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DEAD MEN'S SHOES.
DEAD MEN'S SHOES
% 8»i'>i
BY THE AUTHOR OF
LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET'
ETC. BTC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON
JOHX MAX^YELL AXD CO
4, SHOE LAXE, FLEET STREET
1876
\_AU rights reserred.'\
To Sir J. CORDY BURROWS, J.P,
BRIGHTON.
fy
2
J Deae Sir Cordy Burrows,
If anything can justify the dedication
>
^ of a book to any one, it surely must be a friend-
^ ship that has lasted nearly twenty years; marked
•^'on your side by many acts of care and kindness,
and on mine by a most sincere appreciation of
your genial and generous nature. I have therefore
great pleasure in recording this fact, and I have
still greater pleasure in dedicating this story to you.
4
BeHeve me,
Dear Sir Cordy Burrows,
/s Very sincerely yours.
THE AUTHOR
^ ElCHMOXD,
^ February, 1876.
CONTEXTS TO VOL. I.
CHAP.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
YI.
YII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
PAGE
Plunged in the depth of helpless poverty' i
*0 World, thy slippery tqrns!
The True Metal
*Had the chance been with us that has not
been ' . . . .
Sibyl Faunthorpe's Diary
The Elite op Kedcastle .
Drifting into Haven.
The Eeturn of the Prodigal
Uncle Trenchard
Sibyl takes the Lead
How Stephen Trenchard Forgives .
Love, then, had Hope of Eicher Store
The Sweets of Life .
Making Eeady for Victory
Town and County
A Mysterious Visitor
The Wanderer's Eeturn .
At Arm's Length
24
39
47
60
94
104
117
131
140
152
171
195
208
221
246
273
287
DEAD MEN'S SHOES,
CHAPTEE I.
'PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.'
A GIRL-WOMAX alone on Battersea Bridge, reading a
letter in the December sunset — one of those mild
autumnal afternoons which hang upon the skirts of
winter. A girl in years — a woman in cares. Dark
brown eyes set in a pale, sharply set face ; mouth
rosy and beautiful in form, but too firm in its lines
to be altogether lovely in a woman. A girl whom
the passers by look at interrogatively, wondering
that so much beauty should go alone, and so poorly
clad. Her clothes are not common, but shabby —
a black silk dress that has once been handsome and
VOL. I. B
^ DEAD MEN S SHOES.
fasliionable ; a black felt hat trimmed with thread-
bare velvet ; a sealskin jacket worn bald at the
edges, and dull with exposure to hard weather ;
gloves which indicate that to be gloved at all has
cost the wearer a struggle; boots whose decay is
no less evident than the symmetry of the slender
feet they cover. She walks listlessly up and down
the pavement of the bridge — just the one quiet
promenade to be found in this neighbourhood —
reading a letter from home, or the place which
was her home two years ago. She has seen much
of the world during these two years, — in her own
opinion too much, for she has seen not the fair and
shinins^ fabric in life's loom, but the ra^ojed sleave
thereof
This is the letter which she reads, not once, but
three times over, with deepest attention, as she
paces up and down the quiet old bridge, while the
sunset fades from the cold gray river, and from
that Dutch picture of old red roofs and water-side
shanties on the Middlesex shore, which painters
have loved, and which the Thames Embankment
may perchance have blotted out by this time : —
' PLUXGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVEETY.' 3
^ Eedcastle, Decemher 11th, 186—.
'My dear Sibyl,
'An event has happened which I think
likely to exercise a wonderful iofluence for good
upon all our lives. Stephen Trenchard, yonr
mother s brother, the uncle Stephen you hare all
talked about as children, and whose wealth was
your poor mother's boast, has returned to England,
after nearly thirty years' absence, yellow, wrinkLed,
withered, and eccentric in manners and habits, but
I think not unkindly disposed to any of nsL He
has taken a house at Eedcastle, and is anxious to
have his nieces about Mm, as he calls it. Marion
has already exchanged the discomforts mid
deprivations of a parish doctor's household for the
Oriental luxuries of Lancaster Lodge. I dare say
you remember the house, a square stone building
with two tall iron gates, and two lodges within
thirty yards of the hall door. Some people will
have grandeur at the sacrifice of consistency. He
seems — I mean your uncle Stephen — ^to hare taken
a great fancy to Marion. I meet her lolling in his
barouche, tryiag to look as if she had
4 DEAD men's shoes.
accustomed to ride in a three hundred guinea
carriage all her life, and really doing it very well.
Jenny has also been to see her uncle, but he
thought her rough and uncultivated, and I fear
that, with her present deficiency of manners, she
has little chance of pleasing him. I have sent her
to Miss Mercer's, as a day scholar, since Michaelmas,
but as she will talk to the boys going and returning,
I really think the change is doing her more harm
than good. I have dined with Mr. Trenchard, and
can assure you that the splendour of his table is
something to remember. I don't pretend to be a
judge of wines, though I could give you a lecture
upon tannic acid, alcohol, and so on — experience, to
my mind, being better than theory, and my oppor-
tunities of the rarest — but I know that after dining
with Stephen Trenchard I felt as if my veins ran
quicksilver. Well, my dear, I want you to have
your chance as well as Marion, and I think the
best and wisest course for you will be to beg a
month's holiday from your employer, Mrs. Hazleton,
and come to spend Christmas with your poor old
uncle Eobert. No doubt if you do, your rich old
' PLUGGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.' 5
uncle Stephen will ask you to transfer your society
to Lancaster Lodge, and then you and Marion will
have equal chances. I dare say it will end by liis
asking one or both of you to live with him and
keep his house. He has, I believe, something
like a million to leave behind him, and you three
girls are his nearest relations, and his natuial
heirs. He has spoken very kindly of your mother.
' Let me know what Mrs. Hazleton says about
a holiday. If a month is too much you might ask
for a fortnight. I should think it most unlikely
that you need ever retarn to her. With such a man
as old Trenchard for your uncle, and well disposed
towards you, your teaching days ought to be over.
'Your affectionate Uncle,
' PiOBERT FaUXTHORPE.'
' My teaching days,' repeats the young woman,
bitterly. * He little knows that they were the height
of luxury compared to what has come after them/
The letter is addressed to —
MISS FAUNTHOEPE,
At Mrs. Hazleton's, 19, Lowther Street,
EccLESTOX Square.
b DEAD MEN S SHOES.
It has been re-addressed by an humble friend of
Miss Faunthorpe's, in the person of Mrs. Hazleton's
housemaid, who has enclosed the letter in an
envelope directed to —
MKS. STANMOEE,
At Mrs. Bonny's, 11, Dixon Street,
Chelsea.
An address which indicates a descent in the social
scale from the semi-Belgravian gentility of Lowther
Street, Eccleston Square. And how comes Miss
Faunthorpe to be Mrs. Stanmore, while her affec-
tionate uncle, Eobert Faunthorpe, remains unaware
of a transmutation which must needs have some in-
fluence for good or evil on his niece's future career ?
Marriage is one of those inadvertences which can
hardly go for nothing even in the easiest life.
' So Marion is exhibitinsj herself about Ptcdcastle
in a three hundred guinea barouche,' says Mrs.
Stanmore, putting the letter in her pocket, * while
I have hardly shoes to my feet. I — who w^as
supposed to be the handsome sister, and the clever
sister, and the lucky sister ! And 1 dare not show
my face in Eedcastle, not even if half a million of
'PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY. /
money is to "be lost by my absence. To think that
uncle Stephen should choose just this particular
time for his return ; to think that he should return
at all, when Marion and I made up our minds
ever so long ago that he was little better than a
myth, and was sure to have married a begum
without telling anybody, and to die in India,
leaving all his money to horrid copper-coloured
children. Lucky for ]\Iarion ! '
Then, after a pause, leaving the bridge and
entering the shabby street leading to Cheyne Walk,
she continues her self-communing thus : —
' What shall I say to uncle Eobert ? Suppose
he were to come to town and call at Mrs. Hazleton's.
He may have money now to pay for the journey.
It was safe enough before. Poor uncle Eobert
never had a spare pound, or ever wasted a shilling,
except the shillings he had to pay for summonses
because of being behindhand with the taxes. If
he should come up to London ? Or if uncle Stephen
should be in town and call in Lowther Street ?
More lilvely that. Anglo-Indians are such active
creatures. What am I to do ? '
8 DEAD men's shoes.
Thus disjointedly run her thoughts, as she walks
— very quickly now — along the narrow, shabby
street, past the fried-fish shop, and the pork
butcher's, and the emporium for second-hand goods
— from a picture of the Holy Family, after Eaffaelle,
very much framed, to a flat iron, or a pair of
bluchers — the greengrocer's, also coal merchant, the
cook-shop, with its steam- tarnished windows and
reeking odour of boiled beef and stick-jaw pudding.
' That reminds me,' Mrs. Stanmore says to her-
self, as the reek of cooked provisions salutes her
nostrils, 'there's nothing for dinner.'
She pauses and takes counsel with herself. Her
eye wanders from the cook-shop to the fishmonger's,
thence ranges to the pork butcher's. Her election
lies among these. Cambridge sausages are savoury,
but dear ; and Mrs. Bonny, the landlady, has a trick
of overdoing all things entrusted to her culinary
art. A pound of Cambridge sausages, reduced to
grounds and grease, are hardly worth the shilling
they cost. Boiled beef is expensive and weighs
heavy. For a cheap relish, a zest which shall make
bread and butter supply the place of dinner, your
'PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POTELTY.' 9
fishmonger is your best friend. Mrs. Stanmore
patronizes the finny tribe. She selects an eight-
penny haddock, dried and salted, from the mer-
chant's store, and carries it home with her, rolled
up in brown paper. She stops at the cheap baker's
for a half-quartern loaf, with which the bit over is
not unacceptable. ' I wonder what Marion would
think if she could see me now ? ' she asks herself ;
' Marion who always complained of my pride, and
called herself the Ciuderella of the family. Her
Cinderella-ship never brought her so low as this.'
Home ! bitter mockery of a sweet word. She
turns out of the shabby street into a street still
shabbier, narrow, dirty, and out at elbows. Yet
at its worst not quite so bad as a modern street
under the same conditions, for the red brick houses
are substantial and roomy, and the worm-eaten
oaken window-frames shut out the wind better than
the speculative builder's warped and shrunken deal.
The house which Mrs. Stanmore enters is dark
and gloomy. The wail of a fretful child sounds
from the basement as she lets herself in at the
street door with a convenient latch-key. A
10 DEAD men's shoes.
glimmer from the kitchen stairs is the only light
visible, and to this glimmer Mrs. Stanmore seems
to address herself.
* I've brought home a haddock, Mrs. Bonny.
"Will you be kind enough to broil it at six o'clock ? '
' Oh, very well,' answers a querulous voice from
unseen depths below. ' You can put the 'addock
on the window-sill. I'll come and fetch it when
I've got time ; but I can't say nothink about its
being done by six, for my fire's got low after ironin'.
The parlour has gone out to tea.' •
This last remark has a reproachful sound, as
who should say, ' You never spare me trouble by
going out visiting.'
Mrs. Stanmore deposits the dried fish, and
ascends the dark, old-fashioned staircase, smelling
of mice, whose hurried scamper is audible behind
the mouldering wainscot. One room, the first
floor front, comprises Mr. and Mrs. Stanmore's share
of number eleven, Dixon Street. It is happily a
rather large room, with three windows, provided
with old-fashioned window-seats. The furniture is
old like the house, worn and dingy, but solid furni-
'PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.' 11
ture that has served several generations of house-
keepers and a ragged regiment of lodgers. In the
glow of a cheery little fire the dim old room has
a homely, not unfriendly look. The old tent bed-
stead has been pushed into the most obscure corner.
There are two arm-chairs, with faded chintz covers,
a sofa, large and ponderous. There is a round table
opposite the wide old fireplace, and another table
against the wall, surmounted by a japanned iron tea-
tray of a bright red ground with a landscape in the
middle, a rosewood tea-caddy, a pair of blown glass
decanters, empty, a family Bible — the landlady's —
a ragged copy of Byron's ' Don Juan,' and two
odd duodecimo volumes of ' Tom Jones,' in brown
calf — the lodger's.
^Irs. Stanmore lights a small paraffine lamp,
takes off jacket and hat, and proceeds to prepare
the evenimr meal. She has tea-thinp;s and tea-
kettle to her hand in the roomy and mousey old
closet beside the fireplace — such a closet as is
only to be found in old houses, large enough for
half a dozen burglars to hide in, or a whole nursery
of children to play in, and with all manner of odd
12 DEAD men's shoes.
corners and shelves, and perchance an inner cup-
board lurking mysteriously in its panelled recesses.
Mrs. Stanmore fills the kettle, and sets out the
tea-things on the red japanned tray, and cuts a
plate of bread and butter, and makes a round of
toast deftly enough, though a year ago she was
about the least handy of her sex in such small
domestic offices. That stern schoolmistress, ne-
cessity, has taught her many things. How young
she looks in the ruddy light of the fire, as she kneels
on the hearth-rug toasting that round of bread for
the poor meal that is to be dinner, tea, and supper,
all in one for Mrs. Eonny's first-floor lodgers ! —
how young and how pretty ! every feature so daintily
fashioned, eyes so darkly lustrous, colouring so de-
licate ; young, and with much need of love and
sympathy, of comfort and careful tendance.
'And so uncle Stephen has really come home
— richer than we ever made him in our dreams
when we were children — and Marion is tasting all
tho pleasures his wealth can buy for her, Marion
whom I pitied so when I left her behind me at
Eedcastle. She might pity me now, from the depth
' PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.' 13
of her heart, if she coiild see me. She raight have
written to tell me the change in her fortunes —
selfish thing. I suppose it is on account of my not
answering her last two letters — such stupid letters
as they were too — full of " I hope you are free
from cold," and " I trust you are enjoying the nice
autumn weather " — and Uncle Eobert's rheumatic
gout.'
She lapses into deeper meditation, looking into a
red cavern in the heart of the fire, forgetful of the
toast which hangs despondently upon the twopenny
tin toasting-fork, shaped like Xeptune's trident.
Meditation full of rue, for she has done the most
foolish thmg a woman can do, except one, which
is to repent too late of her folly; and she is fast
coming to that ultimate stage of foolishness, vain
regret for an irrevocable act.
She is still kneeling in front of the fire,
absent-minded, absorbed, when the door opens, and
a young man comes in, slowly, heavily, like one who
brings no gladness with him, and has no hope of
finding comfort at home. He comes quietly to the
hearth, lays his hand upon Sibyl's shoulder, and
14 DEAD men's shoes.
addresses her not unkindly, but with little warmth
in his tone.
* Well, little old woman, brooding over the fire
as usual ? What's the matter now ? '
* Not much more than usual,' his wife answers,
without looking up. ' You've had your customary
luck, I suppose ? ' she inquires, after a pause, during
which her husband has taken off his shabby over-
coat, and fluncf himself into one of the arm-chairs.
* Yes, the wheel of fortune hasn't turned the
other way yet. It revolves persistently, but always
— like the planets — in the same direction. The
immutable laws of bad luck are not to be abrogated
in my favour. The fellows I wanted to see — but-
terfly friends of the past, who might lend me a
fiver if I could catch them in the right humour —
were all out. The situation I applied for has been
given to somebody else. They had a hundred and
thirty-nine applicants, the principal told me, and
gave the berth to the applicant who dotted his i's
with the nearest approach to mathematical precision.
"We take a man's handwriting as the physical
expression of his mental bias," said the principal,
'PLUXGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS PO^T:r.TY.' 15
" and what we want is precision." Xow you know
I never dot my i's at all, or if I do the dot is so far
from the letter as to make my meaning all the more
unintelligible. So much for the clerkship. The
commission agency we saw advertised turns out
a "do." Agent required to put down fifty pounds
as a guarantee of hona fides. I applied for an agency
in the wine trade, offered to a young gentleman
moving in good society and able to push a new
brand of champagne ; but when the wine merchant
saw me, he asked, rather pertinently, if I moved in
good society in this coat. I told him I was a
gentleman by birth and education, and knew some
of the best people in London. "Very likely, my
dear sir," replies the grape-doctor, '' but you don't
visit them. We want young men who dress well,
and look as if they could afford to drink the wine
they recommend ; men who have the appearance
of wealth with the unscrupulousness of poverty."
Rather neatly put by our friend the gooseberry-
fermenter, wasn't it ? '
* And you have done nothing, earned nothing,
are no nearer earning anything than you were
16 DEAD men's shoes.
yesterday ? ' asks Sibyl, without lifting her eyes
to his face.
Yet the time was, not a year ago, when to
gaze upon that countenance seemed to her like
reading a poem, when every turn of the hand-
some head, every sparkle of the dark eyes — eyes
ever of uncertain hue but always dark — was a
thing to remember and dream about ; — when to
watch him across a crowded room was quiet
happiness, all-sufficing for an exacting love —
when to hear his voice, gay or grave, was
sweeter than music.
And now he sits a few paces from her, worn
out, weary, dispirited, in sore need of comfort,
and she cannot raise her eyes from moody con-
templation of the fire. The difference is marked,
the reason obvious. A year ago he was an
undeclared lover — to-day he is an actual husband.
Then there was not a many-petalled flower which
did not suggest the question, *' Loves me, loves
me not ? ' Now he has loved her and won her,
and they have essayed to sail along the river
of life together, and found the navigation difficult
'PLUNGED IX THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.' 17
— ay, hard and bitter as that weedy swamp
through which Sir Samuel Baker's craft was toil-
fully dragged under Afric's torrid sky.
* You couldn't give a neater definition of my
position,' replies Alex Secretan, otherwise Stan-
more. He has striven to hide his destitution under
an assumed name, just as his wife has kept the
secret of an imprudent marriage by retaining a
false address. Either mystery may be discovered at
any moment, so various are the accidents of life.
' Don't consider me frivolous if I remind you
that I haven't eaten anything since half-past eight
this morning, and the perambulation of stony-
hearted London is conducive to an inward
craving. I won't call the feeling by so healthy
a name as hunger. It's a compound sensation
of sickness and emptiness. Is there anything to
eat except bread and butter ? It's a very nice
thing in its way, but one comes to object to it
on the same gTOund that Louis the Fourteenth's
confessor took about partridges.'
'Mrs. Bonny is broiling a haddock,' replies
Sibyl, listlessly.
VOL. L C
18 DEAD men's shoes.
' What good Catholics we are ! keepmg Advent
all the week through. We had bloaters yesterday,
and dried sprats the day before. All our days
are Ember days.'
'Fish is the cheapest thing I can get, Alex.'
' 'No doubt, but it generally entails after expense
in the way of an extra half-pint of beer. No
matter. Let Mrs. Bonny bring forth the haddock,'
exclaimed Alexis, applying himself diligently to
the toast, which Sibyl has just buttered.
She tinkles the bell gently, as a polite hint
to Mrs. Bonny. She dare not give a peremp-
tory ring, as she might for a servant whose
w^ages she paid. Mrs. Bonny — when letting her
lodgings — professes to give attendance to her
lodgers, but that attendance is scanty, and yielded
as a favour rather than a ridit. A lodcjer who
wants extra luxuries, such as onion sauce with
a shoulder of mutton, or fried liver and bacon
for supper, must make things very sweet to Mrs.
Bonny. An order for the theatre, or even an
occasional tumbler of grog, has a mollifying
effect on her disposition, the loan of a newspaper
soothes her sensitive mind. The Stanmores are
'PLUXGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POYEKTY.' 19
too poor to offer even these small attentions, and
are sometimes backward in the payment of their
rent, and thus receive stinted service grudgingly
given. Sibyl pours out the tea languidly, and
with the air of a person out of health. She eats
a little bread and butter, but without appetite,
and when the haddock appears at last, borne by
a slipshod girl, ]Mr. Stanmore has that fish all
to himself, Sibyl refusing any portion thereof
Alexis contemplates her pityingly — tenderly
even ; — that haggard, sickly look in the delicate
face touches him.
' Poor girl, how pale and ill you look ! Xo
appetite too. That's a bad sign. I wish I could
have brought you home something more tempting
than this old finnan. A bird, a sweetbread, or
something of that kind.'
' I could not eat the most exquisite dinner that
was ever cooked, Alex, so you needn't trouble
yourself to regret that. But I do wish for
something, very much.'
' What is it, darling ? You ought to have every
wish gratified just now. You would, if you had
married a rich cheesemonger, or a wharfinger, or a
20 PEAD men's shoes.
packer, or a cotton-spinner, or a brass-founder,
anything except that lowest animal in the scale
of creation, a broken-down swell. What is it,
Sibyl?'
* I want ten pounds, Alex,' she answers, intently,
her elbow on the table, her chin supported by her
hand, her eyes upon his face, attitude and expression
alike earnest.
* Ten pounds, my dearest ! We have been
wanting ten pounds ever since our honeymoon.'
' Don't speak of our honeymoon,' exclaimed
Sibyl, fretfully. * It maddens me when I think how
you squandered money that might have kept us in
comfort for a year.'
' My love, you are so easily maddened,' remon-
strates Alexis, placidly — he has never been seen out
of temper. ' I dare say it was foolish to go the pace
quite as fast as we did, but you had never seen
Paris, and April in Paris with the woman one loves
is the nearest approach that I can imagine to paradise.'
'You speak as if you had tried it often,' says
Sibyl, with a sneer.
* Bah, child, a mere fagon de parler. Do yon
remember our drives to the Cascade, in the balmy
' PLUXGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVEETY.' 21
spring nights, when the stars were shining on the
Bois, and how we used to sit in the lamp-lit
gardens of the cofe^ eating ices and making love ?
If ever we grow rich, Sibyl, we'll go back to Paris
and have another honeymoon. But how about
these ten pounds, little woman? What can you
want with ten pounds ? '
The young wife rises, glides behind her husband's
chair, and, leaning on his shoulder, whispers some-
thing in his ear, a something at which he smiles
tenderly, sadly, and turning in his chair, draws
the young face — so wan and yet so fair — down
to his lips.
' By Jove ! ' he exclaims, * poor little woman, I
am a brute, never to have thought of it. You want
to buy clothes for the poor little beggar who is to
make his first appearance upon the stage of life,
before the innocent lambkins have begun to bleat in
the meadows, undisputed heir to his father's impecu-
niosity. The lower animals have the advantage
of us in that respect, by the by. The lambkins
come into the world amply provided. You shall
have the money, Sibyl. Yes, if I have to borrow,
beg, rob for it. You shall have it somehow, even if
22 DEAD men's shoes.
I were driven to beg of my bitterest foe, ay, of
Stephen Trenchard himself.'
His arm is round her and he feels her start at
the name.
' Don't be frightened, little woman. That's only
a figure of speech. I never saw Stephen Trenchard
in my life, and as to begging of him, there's nothing
more unlikely, since he is, to the best of my
knowledge, an inhabitant of the city of palaces,
otherwise Calcutta.'
* He might have come back to England, Alex,
without your knowing anything about it,' suggests
Sibyl.
'Ay, that might he have done easily, child,
seeing that he is a very insignificant person in this
big busy world, and that I know nothing whatever
about him, except that he did me deadly wrong
before I was born.'
' And you were taught to hate him ? '
'Yes verily, before I learned my catechism I
learned to hate Stephen Trenchard with a righteous
and a godly hate, for was he not the falsest and
meanest of men ? and the Scripture does not forbid
us to hate falsehood and meanness. If Eve had
' PLUNGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.' 23
hated the serpent a little, humanity in general
would not have gone wrong. Trenchard was like
the serpent, a creature that crawled, a wriggling
worm in the guise of a man. He wriggled and
wormed himself into the fortune that should have
been my father's ; he wriggled and wormed himself
into the heart of my father s first love ; and he did
all this wrong, — deliberate wrong, mark you, basely
conceived, the study of his days and nights, with a
smiling face, clasping his victim's hand in friendship
all the while, so that no thunderbolt falling from
the skies could have surprised my father more than
the discovery that his arch enemy was thcrc^ hiding
under the mask of his humble friend.'
Alexis has risen, and paces the room, fired by
this memory of a lesson learned in earliest boyhood.
As deeply as he loved his dead father, so deeply
does he hate his father's enemy and betrayer.
Sibyl watches him, thoughtful and perplexed. Of
all things difficult to impossibility, nothing could
seem more so than to reconcile her love and duty to
her husband, and her desire to win her uncle's
fortune.
CHAPTEE 11.
' WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS ! '
Given a ten-pound note which must be had.
Query, where to get it? A problem not over-easy
of solution for a man who has exhausted the
generosity of those few friends who are generous,
and discovered the hoUowness of those numerous
acquaintances who, not ill-natured in the beaten
way of friendship, will do anything for a friend
except open their purse-strings.
A sharp December morning. The wind has
changed in the night from south-west to due east,
and there has been a light fall of snow, which is
whitening the various and picturesque roofs of
Chelsea, and hangs on the ragged elm branches on
Cheyne Walk, The river is dun colour, the sky iron-
gray, as if the atmosphere were heavily charged with
snow. Butchers' boys, cabmen, and those denizens
of the street who seem to get through their daily
round of labour with an ample margin of leisure for
^ AVOELD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS ! ' 25
gossip and standing about at corners, look up at the
darkened vault of heaven and opino that there will
be a heavy fall of snow before night.
This is the cold world which Alexis Secretan
faces, leaving his wife asleep in the old tent bed at
number eleven, Dixon Street. She has fallen into
slothful habits of late, pleading as her excuse that
there is so little to get up for, now-a-days.
Certainly not pleasure or prosperity, not even so
much as a new book to read, for does not that
ragged old ' Don Juan,' whose bitterest verses Alexis
gloats over in his gloomiest moods, constitute, with
graceless 'Tom Jones,' the entire stock of literature
in Sibyl Secretan's reach ?
Ten pounds. He faces the bitter blast blowing
up the river from Plumstead and Woolwich and all
the chilly eastern marshes, and seeming to con-
centrate its biting power upon innocent Cheyne
Walk, he faces the rasping wind moodily, puzzling
out this insolvable problem, where to get ten
pounds 1 Where to get it ? that is the only
question. The how to get it has been settled
from the beginnins:. He must borrow it. He has
2Q DEAD men's shoes. ^
almost outgrown the sense of degradation which
accompanies the earlier stages of the borrower's
piteous career, — he has almost reached the lower
depth of the hardy and habitual borrower. He has
but to settle with himself upon whom he shall make
his demand. For himself he might perchance never
have stooped to borrow. He would have emigrated
rather, and lived by the sweat of his brow in some
new country where men are equal, and poverty less
than a crime ; or, his heart failing him, he might
have flung himself and his difficulties off Waterloo
Bridge, and so made an easy end of them ; but with
a young and beloved wife dependent on him for
daily bread he has sacrificed pride and independence,
manhood and honesty even, he sometimes thinks,
and for the last six months has lived a wretched
hand-to-mouth existence, trying to get employment
all the time, and occasionally earning a fortuitous
five-pound note, but supporting the burden of life
for the most part by the aid of loans obtained from
the associates of happier days. He is not a man
upon whom so pitiful a position sits lightly ;
though — being gifted by nature with a peculiarly
'0 WOELD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS!' 27
sweet and easy temper — he has a way . of taking
his troubles placidly, especially in the presence of
his wife, and his railings at Fate and Fortune,
though frequent, are philosophical rather than
angry or vindictive. He is a man who, if Nature's
bounties are to be counted as a heritage, is not
undowered. Eminently handsome, of a noble
presence, athletic, with a constitution to which
illness and disease are unknown — with a voice that
can soothe or charm, threaten or command — an eye
that dominates man and the lesser animals alike —
a quick, bright intellect — a wondrous power of
endurance — that noble quality which in a horse
we call 'stay,' which in man is perhaps the
crowning characteristic of manhood, — with such
gifts as these, Alexis Secretan should hardly count
himself ill furnished for the battle of life. Un-
happily, the old fairy story of the Princess's
christening gifts repeats itself more or less in every
man's life. Among the numerous good fairies who
were invisible guests at Alexis Secretan's baptismal
feast two evil fairies slipped in unawares. These
were Poverty and Unthrift.
28 DEAD men's shoes.
' He shall have little of this world's goods,' said
the first.
'And he shall squander that little/ added the
second.
This baptismal curse has been fulfilled. The
only son of a disinherited father, Alexis has yet
escaped the chastening influence of that sharp
schoolmaster. Poverty. His mother's fortune was
enough to support father and son in luxurious
idleness, and in a happy-go-lucky, easy kind of life
in foreign cities, where life is cheaper, gayer, and
brighter than at home. At seventeen his father's
influence was sufficient to obtain him a commission
in a crack regiment. Father and mother died
within a year of each other, and soon after Alexis
had put on his epaulettes. The remnant of his
mother's fortune — the bulk thereof having been
anticipated, and made away with from year to year as
necessity impelled — served to keep the young man
going in an expensive profession for about five
years, during which he had the good fortune to see
some active service, distinguish himself by various
displays of reckless daring, and obtain a captaincy.
* '^ORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS 1 ' 29
At the end of the fifth year he had spent the last
shilling of his capital, and was in debt. Knowing
the impossibility of living on his pay, he sold out-
and for some time — about a year and a half —
contrived to live upon the proceeds of his com-
mission, having thus sacrificed his military career
to the necessities of eighteen months' idleness, and
to that miserable condition of a noble profession
which makes it impossible that a gentleman should
live by his sword.
Alexis reviews the ranks of his acquaintances as
he walks Londonwards. He has exhausted the
bounty of his easy-going, and, in some cases, open-
handed brother ofiicers. No hope of help there.
His foreign education has left him without school
friends near at hand. Honest Max, or jovial Fritz
of Heidelberg might advance him a thaler — or a
handful of groschen — were they within reach, but
their normal state is impecuniosity.
There is but one source left undrained. Even
in this depth of destitution he has not yet appealed
to his mother's sole surviving sister, his aunt
Louisa, co-heiress with his mother of a rich
30 DEAD men's shoes.
Manchester manufacturer, and more fortunately
married than his mother. Aunt Louisa is the wife
of Dudley Gorsuch, barrister, in large practice, and
member for Glaseford, in the Potteries, a self-made
man, self-important, and worshipping rank and
mammon, as the Ammonites worshipped Moloch.
On this bleak December morning it occurs to Alexis
that aunt Louisa, being of his mother's kin, must
have some green spot in her nature, some place in
her heart accessible to softer feeling, were it but the
size of a pin's point, and that he, her nephew,
destitute and forlorn, ought to be able to find that
place.
He has dined at her house when he was a
dashing young officer, well dressed, well surrounded ;
has been entertained bounteously by her, made
much of, presented to her friends with some touch
of pride, being verily a young man for women to be
proud of in his prosperous days. At that happier
time aunt Louisa appeared to him worldly, but
good-natured, hospitable, benevolent even.
He is at the bottom of Grosvenor Place by this
time, and has made up his mind to try aunt Louisa.
' WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TUEXS ! ' 31
Mr. and ^Irs. Gorsucli live in a street out of
Grosvenor Place, too expensive a street for Mr.
Gorsuch's means, which are larger in appear-
ance than reality; but a fine house in a fine
neighbourhood is a standing evidence of wealth,
and as such is worth all it costs. There are
so many things in which prudent careful people
can save money ; notably in their meals and the
food they give their ser^-ants, since these matters
appertain to the inner economy of a household, and
are secrets to the outer world. Mrs. Gorsuch
pinches in all domestic details, even down to
scouriug-paper. Mr. Gorsuch gives three state
dinners in the season, supplied by Gunter, banquets
of imposing appearance, but washed down with
wines that range from half a crown to four and
sixpence per bottle.
Alexis, fully aware of his broken-down appear-
ance, is too wise to put forward his relationship as
a claim to be admitted, despite the footman's
suspicious look.
He simply asks to see ^Mrs. Gorsuch, but he
gives his real name, Mr. Secretan.
32 DEAD men's shoes.
He is left Id the hall while the footman
communicates with his mistress, whose voice is
heard in the library at the back of the hall.
' She can hardly deny herself when I can hear
her talking,' thinks Alexis.
She does not deny herself. The man ushers him
into the library — a square apartment with a gloomy
outlook, and two pompous bookcases, containing
law books, and a few of those classic authors whose
works are more largely bought than read.
A fire burns frostily and cheerily in the bright
steel grate. Mrs. Gorsuch sits at the table, with a
row of tradesmen's books and a ponderous plated
inkstand before her. She has been trying to
reconcile discrepancies between the butcher's
account of meat delivered and her own idea of the
meat that ought to have been consumed. Threa
pounds of rump steak sit heavily upon her soul.
She cannot see how those three pounds of butcher's
meat can have been honestly eaten, and she is
haunted by the image of an all-devouring policeman
— or those bloodsuckers, the cook's relatives.
She is a little dried-up looking woman, with stiff
' WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS ! ' 33
bands of light aaburn hair, pepper-castored with
gray ; a brown merino gown, a pinched-looking lace
cap, and a double eye-glass attached to a chain
which glitters in the rosy light of the fire, as she
turns to look at her visitor, glass in hand.
' Alex ! ' she exclaims, ' Good heavens, w^hat a
change ! "
She saw him last as a guest at one of her state
dinners, elegant, prosperous-looking, with the easy
self-assured air of a man certain of success in life.
She sees him now reduced to the lowest ebb in
the tide of man's existence. He comes to her as
a beggar. Mendicancy is written on his face.
' Yes, there's a marked decadence from the
young man about town, is there not ? ' he replies.
' You see the brand which Destitution stamps upon
her children. I have fallen very low in the world
since I used to come to your swell parties. You were
very kind to me in those da3^s, aunt,' — Mrs. Gorsuch
winces, knowing so well what is coming, — ' so kind
that I have made up my mind to sue for a small
kindness to-day. It goes against the grain, but "
' Before we talk about kindnesses, Alexis, per-
VOL. L D
34 DEAD men's shoes.
haps you will be good enough to explain how you
have sunk to this absolutely disreputable condition ? '
asked Mrs. Gorsuch, looking at her nephew's boots.
* The easiest thing in the world,' answers Alexis,
with agreeable recklessness. ' I have spent all my
money, and have not yet acquired the knack of
earning more.'
He sees, dimly, that there is little to be hoped
from this flesh and blood of his, and that placid
despair which is his normal condition enables him
to take things easily.
'Earning!' echoes aunt Louisa, with a bitter
sneer. ' It isn't in any of your race to earn the bread
they eat. My father made his fortune by honest
industry, your father thought he honoured our family
when he exchanged his landless gentility for my
sister's thirty thousand pounds. Poor Maud 1 it was
a luckless day that brought him across her path.'
'Eeserve your pity, aunt Louisa. My mother's
married life was a happy one. I can bear witness
to that.'
' Happy ! ' exclaims Mrs. Gorsuch, contemp-
uously. ' Was she in society ? '
'0 WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS ! ' 35
This question she evidently considers unanswer-
able. Alexis respects her opinion, and makes no reply.
' Can you compare her position with mine ? '
' Certainly not. You have a handsome house
in a fashionable street, a bishop for your right-hand
neighbour, an earl on your left hand. You have the
orthodox establishment of a lady, and all the cares
that accompany it. My mother lived a roving life
in some of the loveliest places of this earth, and
had no servant but the maid who waited on her
when she was well and nursed her when she was
ill, and loved her dearly always. My mother's
society consisted of the few friends who were faith-
ful to her through all changes of fortune. Those do
not count, of course. No, she was not in society ;
but perhaps when you and she compare notes as
to your earthly experiences in a wiser world you
may find that the balance has been more evenly
adjusted than you suppose now.'
Mrs. Gorsuch has hardly heard him. Her mind
is troubled by a grave doubt.
* I hope you did not tell the butler that you are
my nephew,' she says, anxiously.
36 DEAD men's shoes.
' I had too much discretion for that. And now,
aunt, not wishing to intrude myself or my boots
(lie has perceived her uneasy glances at those
patched offenders against the decencies of life) upon
you longer than is absolutely necessary, I will come
to the point. AVill you lend me, or give me, ten
pounds ? If Fate is against me you may call it a
gift, but if Fortune favour me it shall be repaid
tenfold. I needn't tell you how badly I want money.
My appearance testifies to my necessities, but it
is not for myself that I am a beggar. It is for
my wife, soon to become a mother.*
' What ? ' almost shrieks Mrs. Gorsuch. ' Mar-
ried! Without income or profession, you have
linked yourself to some unhappy creature ? '
' Yes, we have taken the liberty to unite our
destitution. If the worst comes to the worst the
same pan of charcoal that serves for one will
accommodate the other.'
' Your impiety shocks but does not surprise me,'
says Mrs. Gorsuch. * Such sinful imprudence could
hardly be found in a man of religious prin-
ciples.'
37
'"No, prudence and piety generally go in double
harness. Well, aunt, I have my answer. You
won't lend or give me the money ? '
* In the first place, I have not such a sum to
lend. Mr. Gorsuch's position demands the ex-
penditure of our income. We are never in
debt,' with a shudder, ' but we have never anything
to spare. I had to strain every nerve in order
to pay our annual contribution to the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts.'
'^nd you have nothing left for a starving
nephew at home.'
* Even if I were in a position to advance you
this money — which I repeat I am not — I cannot
see that your condition would be materally im-
proved by the loan. Where would you be when
the money was spent ? '
'Exactly where I am now. The money is not
for myseK, but for my wife. I should not touch
a sixpence of it.'
'Who was this unfortunate young woman when
you married her ? '
38 DEAD men's shoes.
' Will you lend me ten pounds ? ' asks Alexis,
ignoring the question.
' Sadly to be pitied, poor creature, whoever she was.
Some young person of inferior position, I dare say.'
* Will you lend me ten pounds ? '
' I have already told you that I have no such
sum at my disposal, Alexis,' replies Mrs. Gorsuch.
And then, hesitatingly, reluctantly extracting a coin
from a plethoric-looking Eussia leather purse, she
adds, ' If half a sovereign will be of some small
assistance '
' It won't,' answered her nephew, abruptly. * I
dare say I could make as much in a day by sweeping
a crossing, and I shouldn't feel myself so degraded
as if I took the money from you. Good-bye, aunt.'
* He has opened the door before he concludes,
and Aunt Louisa endures agonies for the rest of
the day, fearful that the butler, or man of all work,
heard that last address. Eemorse for her treatment
of her nephew troubles her not at all.
'He cannot say that I sent him away empty-
handed,' she reflects. ' I offered him half a sove-
s
CHAPTEE III.
THE TRUE METAL.
Alexis Secretax turns his back upon the solemn
'responsibilites of Tubal Street, Grosvenor Place, sick
with anger and despair. He is angry with himself
rather than with his aunt. He loathes himself
for having invited such humiliation.
' I ought to have known her better,' he muses.
'A woman who gives showy dinners and cheap
wines, and talks of her friend the Duchess of
Landsend, or the Countess of John-o'-Groat ; a
woman whose name appears in the subscription
list of all the orthodox charities, just under the
nobility, and who never keeps a servant six months.
And yet she is my mother's sister, of the same
race ; my mother, whose nature was all kindness,
and with whom to give was as natural as to
breathe.'
40 DEAD men's shoes.
He stands at Hy^e Park Corner, indifferent to
the east wind and the falling snow, — fine small
snow-flakes that lie unmelted where they fall.
* Now which way shall I turn myself in search
of a friendly soul ? ' he asks.
He turns south-westward, perhaps to escape
that biting easterly blast, and walks towards
Brompton, listlessly, hopelessly, walking fast bo
keep himself warm, but with no settled purpose.
Past the Bell and Horns Tavern he stops and
looks up at one of the houses in the high road, a
house with a front garden — or railed enclosure,
which courtesy calls garden — a snowy parallelo-
gram, in which flourish four melancholy bushes,
like dwarf cypresses in a graveyard. The house is
neat and bright-looking, and a bill in the parlour
window announces that apartments are to be let
within.
Alexis opens the gate as if familiar with its
structure, goes up to the door hesitatingly, knocks,
and asks to see Mr. Plowden. He is ushered forth-
with into the back parlour, where a man of about
his own age, pale and thoughtful-looking, sits by
THE TEUE METAL. 41
an indifferent fire painting a map. A pile of un-
painted maps, a battered old tin paint-box and
brushes lie on tlie table before him. The thin white
hand travels dexterously, rapidly over the paper,
leaving a delicate line of colour behind it.
The map-painter looks up at Alexis, brush in
hand, surveys him from head to foot, wonderingly,
and drops the brush full of colour, on the map.
^ Captain Secretan ! ' he exclaims, ' Is it pos-
sible ? '
'It's true, at any rate,' answers Alexis, holding
out his hand, which the other grasps affectionately.
'Theoretically impossible, perhaps, but absolutely
true. Just wash off that splash of cobalt, Dick.
I shouldn't like you to spoil one of your maps
on my account.'
' I'm so glad to see you,' says Richard Plowden,
dabbing the map with a sponge rather nervously.
' I was afraid you'd quite forgotten me, and that
we should never see you here again, either as a
lodger or a friend. However, here you are, and
I'm heartily glad to see you,' poking the dingy
Little fire vigorously, and then holding out his
42 . DEAD men's shoes.
hand again to Alexis; 'but I'm afraid things
haven't been going so well with you as they
ought. You look *
'Poor/ interjects Alexis. 'You're not far out.
Poverty and small-pox are unmistakable diseases.
You can see them in a man's face. Before you
say another kind word to me, Dick, I must tell
you the truth — the naked, unpleasant truth. I
come to you as a beggar. Knowing how hard
you work for every shilling you earn — knowing
what a good fellow you are — good son, good friend,
good Christian — I am mean enough to come here
and ask you to help me. The worthless drone
appeals to the honest, independent bee.'
* So far as I can help you,' replies Mr. Plowden,
with undiminished kindliness, ' I am at your
service. You were a profitable lodger to my mother,
and a kind friend to me. It isn't many gentlemen
in your position who would have condescended to
associate with a lame invalid, who gets his living by
painting maps. I know those evenings when you
used to come and smoke your pipe down here were
some of the happiest in my life.'
THE TRUE JIETAL. 43
He walks about the room as he speaks, drags a
chair to the fireside for Alexis, takes a loaf of bread,
a bottle of anchovies, a pat of butter, and a bottle of
ginger wine out of the chiffonier, spreads a napkin,
and arranges this temperate refreshment on one side
of the table, pushing his maps and colour-box to
the other. He walks lame, but is active and
hardy notwithstanding.
^Do you suppose I should have spent many
evenings with you if I had not found your company
pleasant, Dick ? ' says Alexis, lightly. ' I found that
you had read more and thought more than any
fellow of my acquaintance, and it was refreshing to
me to hear your ideas upon all manner of subjects.
And then I flattered myself that you liked me, and
were pleased with my talk of the gay world ; above
all, about that stage you love so well and see so
little of Do you remember how we used to discuss
the actors of the day, Dick, and settle how
Shakespeare ought to be interpreted ? '
' Do you think I can ever forget ? ' asks Eichard
Plowden. 'I've not so many friends that I can
afford to forget the one who was the first to tell me
44 DEAD men's shoes.
I had a mind. Do you know, Captain Secretan,
that IVe had the impertinence to write a book since
then ? Do peg into those anchovies, captain, and
don't mind cutting the knobs off the loaf. I like
crumb as well as crust.^
'A book, Dick. An essay on the genius of
Shakespeare ! '
'Nothing so ambitious, or so unlikely to sell.
A geography for schools, on a new system. It is
not published yet, but I have reason to believe that
it will be, and that I shall make a little money by
it. So you may have less compunction in borrowing
a pound or two.'
* Dear old Dick ! ' exclaims Alexis, who has been
doing ample justice to the anchovies and bread and
butter, and warming himself with a glass of ginger
wine. ' Unhappily, it is not a question of a pound
or two. I want ten pounds.'
Eichard Plowden's countenance falls. It is not
that he would measure his friendship, but ten
pounds is an awful sum.
' If I ever can repay it I will, and with interest
at a more than usurious rate. But it is almost a
THE TRUE METAL. 45
mockery to talk of repayment in my present
condition.'
Eichard limps to the chiffonier without a word,
takes out a little japanned cash-box, unlocks it,
and extracts therefrom a five-pound note and five
sovereims.
' I had the money ready for the Christmas rent,'
he says, ' but you are welcome to it. We shall be
able to rub along without it, I dare say."
What pinching and deprivation this rubbing
along process will cost, Alexis can pretty well guess,
for he has seen how the widow Plowden and her
son live at the best of times.
He takes the money with a faltering hand, and
turns away his face to hide the tears that disfigure
it, the first that he has shed since he wept for his
mother's death.
Presently he grows cheerful again, resumes his
seat, finishes his luncheon, and then tells Richard
Plowden the story of his decadence, an unvarnished
tale which his humble friend hears with deepest
interest.
* If you could put me in the way of earning a
46 DEAD men's shoes.
few shillings a week by any kind of labour,
however humble, you would be doing me even a
greater favour than you have done me this day ; and
yet, knowing your circumstances as I do, I feel as
if you had given me ten years of your life instead
of ten pounds.'
Eichard Plowden promises that he will turn the
matter over in his mind, and see what he can do,
and so the two young men part, as firm friends as
in the days when Mrs. Plowden's first-fioor lodger,
the dashing young captain, was the object of her
son's affectionate admiration, his ideal of all that is
noble and splendid in manhood.
CHAPTER lY.
'HAD THE CHAXCE BEEN WITH US THAT HAS NOT
BEEN.'
Alexis speeds homeward joyously, elate as if he
had conquered fortune. He has borrowed money
from a social inferior, and yet does not feel hu-
miliated. That interview with Pdchard Plowden
has cheered him wondrously. The patient, gentle
soul working at monotonous task-work in a gloomy
back parlour, with no outlook save blank wall and
cistern, working uncomplainingly, nay, even cheer-
fully, has read him a lesson. There must be work
for a strong, healthy fellow like himself when a
cripple in a back room can earn his living. Alexis
begins to think he has tried life at the wrong end,
that in striving for some shabby-genteel, reduced-
gentleman's occupation, he has overlooked those
lowlier and less sophisticated avocations which offer
themselves to every honest man.
48 DEAD men's shoes.
'We'll emigrate as soon as the little woman
is strong enough for a sea voyage/ he tells him-
self, 'and I'll turn shepherd on the Australian
downs/
Sibyl receives him with an eager look, full of
questioning. She is sitting on the hearth-rug as
he comes into the room, in her favourite attitude,
looking into the fire, her ruffled hair golden in
the ruddy light, her eyes heavy with thought or
care.
His elated aspect tells her that he has been
successful. She rises and runs to him, trembling
with anxiety.
' Have you got the money ? *
' Yes, Sibyl. Of all my friends, the one who
could least afford to lose it was the only one to
lend it. Here it is, little one. You must make it
go a long way, for it has cost me sore humiliation."
* It was lent grudgingly, then ? '
* No ; but it was refused heartlessly by the
wrong person before I hit upon the right one.
Make the most of it, my love, now you've got it.'
His wife takes the little parcel of money from
* HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US.* 49
his hand, slowly, looking downward, and without
a word.
' You are pleased, little woman ? '
' It was very good of you to try so hard,' she
answers in a low voice.
She begins to busy herself about her husband's
dinner without another word. This evening she
gives him half a pound of rump-steak, an unwonted
feast, at which his soul rejoices.
'I am faring sumptuously to-day,' he says, as
she sits opposite to him, pouring out the tea wdth
a listless, absent air, which he takes for physical
languor. 'I have had a superb luncheon already.'
All that evening Sibyl is unwontedly silent,
and Alexis, not caring to describe his interview
with Mrs. Gorsuch, has not much to tell her after
he has related Eichard Plowden's generosity. He
has recourse to the tattered leaves of ' Don Juan,'
and sits sniggering over his favourite passages, and
feeling as if he and the poet were both outside
the human race generally, and could afford to ridi-
cule and despise it.
He sallies forth early next morning, despite
VOL. I. E
50 DEAD men's shoes.
the snow, which now clothes the land as a gar-
ment, and goes straight to Brompton, to have
another cheery talk with Dick Plowden, and to
inquire whether that back parlour philosopher has
hit upon any method by which he, Alexis, may
earn his daily bread.
Eichard is hopeful. He has an uncle engaged
in a large shipping agent's office, an uncle who
would have obtained employment for Eichard him-
self, had Eichard's legs been more serviceable in
active life. To this uncle, Mr. Sampson Plowden,
Dick writes a long letter, setting forth his friend's
capacities and desire for employment; and, armed
with this recommendation, Alexis speeds to the
offices of Messrs. Keel and Skrew, in a narrow
alley out of Fenchurch Street. He sees Sampson
Plowden, an active little elderly man, who asks
him if he can write a good hand, and if he is
quick at accounts. Alexis asks for a sheet of
paper, and writes a few lines in a clerk-like hand,
taking care to dot his i's this time, and then
volunteers to solve any arithmetical puzzle that
Mr. Plowden likes to set him.
' HAD THE CHANCE BEEX WITH US.' 51
' Well, I'll take your word and Dick's as to the
book-keeping/ replies Mr. Plowden. ' AVe employ
a good many cleiks, and sometimes have to send
one to Australia, which makes a vacancy. The
next time this occurs you shall hear of it. The
junior clerks are in my department, and it's in my
province to engage or dismiss them. I'U bear you
in mind, Mr. Stanmore.'
* If you could send me to Australia/ hazards
Alexis, glowing with hope, ' it would suit me ad-
mirably.'
'Well, well, that would be a matter involving
much consideration. However, you shall hear from
me at the first opportunity.'
This is not much, but it is something; for
Mr. Plowden looks like a man who means what he
says, and Dick has given him a high character for
integrity and kindness of heart. Alexis plods home-
wards, cheered and sustained by sorrow's pole-star,
Hope.
He lets himself in at number eleven, Dixon
Street, the door being on the latch, and goes up-
stairs, prepared to find Sibyl in a brighter frame
UNIVERSITY OF »LU'*Ofr
62 DEAD men's shoes.
of mind than usual, busy at her needlework most
likely, the lamp burning, the hearth swept, the
evening meal set out, with neatness which lends
its charm even to poverty.
The room looks curiously blank and dreary as
he enters it. The lire has gone out ; cheerless sight,
with that white world ontside, and the thermo-
meter below freezing-point. There is no tea-tray,
no white cloth on the table, no lamp burning.
The dusk is just light enough to show him that
the room is empty, and that no preparation has
been made for his refreshment.
He goes back to the landing and calls over the
balusters to his landlady : ' Has my wife been
out long, Mrs. Bonny ? '
' She went out just before dinner-time,' screams
a voice from below.
Dinner-time with Mrs. Bonny means one
o'clock.
' She has gone to buy things, I dare say,' thinks
Alexis, 'gone to London most likely. She ought
to have been home by half-past four, though, if
she went as early as one. Did she leave any mes-
' HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US.' 53
sage, Mrs. Bonny ? ' he asks, calling over the bal-
usters again.
' No,' replies the landlady, curtly, ' she didn't
leave no message, but she took a carpet bag.'
*A carpet bag,' repeats Alexis, with a puzzled
air, as he goes back to the blank, cold room. ' What
could she want with a carpet bag ? To bring the
things home, perhaps, — foolish little thing! As if
a parcel wasn't lighter to carry than a carpet bag.'
He gi'opes for wood and coals in the bottom of
the roomy cupboard, and lights a fire, patiently, toil-
fully, not unskilfully, with hands which have learned
many offices unknown to the elegant Captain Secretan.
He is dispirited by his wife's absence, but not
angry. That placid, easy temper of his is full of
tenderness and indulgence for the ' little woman '
whose brief married life has been so full of care,
who approaches the mystery of maternity under
such sorrowful conditions. He lights his fire, brings
out a loaf, a starveling slice of cheese, and some
small-beer in a bottle, and sits by the hearth to
eat his meal in the firelight. As he eats and
drinks his eyes wander thoughtfully round the
54 DEAD men's shoes.
firelit room, jets of flame flashing and twinkling
on the wainscot.
' Not a bad old room by any means,' he thinks,
* if one had just enough money to live in it com-
fortably ? '
He fancies that in Sampson Plowden's friendship
he has found the clue that shall extricate him from
the maze of adversity. How happy Sibyl and he
might be in this humble old room were he but
employed as clerk at Messrs. Keel and Skrew's
with a salary of say thirty shillings a week ! Not
an ambitious desire, surely, in a young man whose
family history is set forth with some flourish in
Burke's ' Landed Gentry.'
'I shall have something pleasant to tell the
little woman when she comes home, at any rate,'
thinks Alexis, as he sips the flat fourpenny ale,
put carefully away after last night's supper.
A pert little flame spurts out of a knob of coal
just at this moment, brightening the whole room,
and Secretan's eye, wandering idly as he muses, is
attracted by a spot of white upon the sideboard.
' A letter, by Jove ! ' he exclaims. * Who the
' HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US.' 55
deuce can have written to me, when not a mortal
knows my address ? '
He rises — listlessly — apprehending no advantage
from the letter, lights the lamp, and goes over to
the sideboard. The letter is from his wife.
'Dear Alexis,
' Our misery of the last few months has opened
my eyes to the sad truth that it would have been
far better for both of us had we never met, or had
we been wise enough to defer our marriage till we
had some settled means of living. What am I but
a burden to you? How many situations there
are in which you could get your living were you
alone and unfettered ! while I could at least return
to the dull drudgery of teaching, and escape
the pinch of absolute poverty. Do not think me
cold-hearted, dear Alexis, when I tell you that I
am weary of our continual struggle, and that I
have resolved to end it by an act which may
provoke your indignation, but which, I feel assured,
will result in your advantage. I set you free from
the burden of a wife whom you have found it too
56 DEAD men's shoes.
bitter a task to support. You have rarely uttered
a complaint, but I have seen despair in your face
often enough to learn that it has settled in your
heart. Without me you may begin the world
afresh. Apart from you I shall have opportu-
nities of prosperity as Miss Faunthorpe, which I
could never have as Mrs. Secretan. If my lot
changes, and fortune smiles, as I dare to hope it
will, you shall hear of me ; and even if you blame
me for a separation which your anger may call a
desertion, believe at least that in severance, as in
union, I shall be ever your true and loyal wife,
' Sibyl.'
Alexis reads and re-reads' this letter like a man
who hast lost the power of understanding his mother
tongue, and pores over familiar words as though they
were the hieroglyphics of an Assyrian inscription.
So cold, so heartless, so deliberate. His heart
sickens at the thought of such cruelty. In all his
adversity, with starvation staring him in the face,
he has thought of his wife as part of himself; has
never considered the responsibility of providing for
* HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US.' 57
her as doubling the difficulty of existence ; has
never for a moment remembered that life might
be easier to him without her. He has been sorry
for her, has thought of her deprivations, her
endurance, but of the burden upon himself — never.
All hopes and dreams of a happier future have
centred themselves in her. To win a brighter home
for her, to surround her with comfort, has been his
one ambition. Eeckless as his marriage was, he
has never repented it. Fettered hand and foot as
he has found himself by that iU-considered act, he
has never wished the tie loosened.
He stands with the letter in his hand, repeating
the words to himself incredulously. It must be a
jest — a trick to test his love — anything but the
base and bitter truth.
He puts the letter in his pocket at last, goes
downstairs, and penetrates the sacred domain of
Mrs. Bonny ; namely, the front kitchen, which is
at once the parlour or living-room, where Mr. Bonny,
employed as a railway porter, tastes the sweets of
domestic leisure, and the apartment in which Mrs.
Bonny cooks for her lodgers. The back kitchen
58 DEAD men's shoes.
makes a cheerful bedroom, and in summer-time,
when Mr. Bonny trains scarlet runners over the
window, enjoys a rustic outlook.
Alexis is received somewhat coldly by Mrs.
Bonny, that lady being intent upon frying sausages
for the railway porter's evening repast, and resenting
all intrusion upon her private domain on principle.
He questions her closely as to the mode and manner
of his wife's departure, but she can tell him no
more than she has told him already. Mrs.
Stanmore went out between twelve and one o'clock,
carrying a small carpet bag.
*I shouldn't have known anything about it if
I hadn't happened to meet her as I was fetching
of the dinner beer, our Mary Ann being washing,
and no one else to fetch it.'
* Did she say nothing to you ? *
'Not a word; she just gives me a nod, in her
off-hand way, and walks on.'
That is all. Alexis goes upstairs again, heavily,
slowly, and paces the deserted room. By-and-by he
pauses before a rickety old chest of drawers with
brass handles and locks, opens a drawer, and finds
* HAD THE CHANCE BEEX WITH US.' 59
it empty. It is the drawer that contained his
wife's poor remains of a wardrobe that had never
been richly furnished, a few under garments, a
collar or two, and so on. These she has evidently
taken with her. Nothing could have been more
deliberate than her departure.
Presently a curious idea occurs to him, improba-
ble, but it takes a strong hold upon him nevei-theless.
Has she gone to make away with herself ? and
is this heartless letter of hers a tender device to
save him the pain of knowing that she had been
driven by despair to suicide ?
Tliis seems to him more likely, more natural
than that the wife he loves can desert him; can,
with coldest calculation, barter love and truth
against the chances of prosperity.
What those chances are he knows not. He is
so ignorant of his wife's family and surroundings
as not to know that Sibyl Faunthorpe is the niece
of Stephen Trenchard.
Why he is thus unenlightened is a question that
can be only answered by a retrospect, and will be
best answered in Sibyl's own words.
CHAPTEE V.
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE's DIAEY.
LowTHER Street, November 14, 186- I suppose
to keep a diary is about as' foolish a thing as any
one can do — waste of time in the present, and self-
abasement in the future. I dare say I shall hate
myself when I read over these pages in years to
come, and see what a stupid creature I was at
nineteen years of age. However, I am driven to
scribble about myself and my feelings for want of
anything better to do in the long, lonely evenings,
when the children are gone to bed, and Mrs.
Hazleton is out, and I have the dreary schoolroom
all to myself. I used to read any novel I could Und
lying about downstairs, and bring up here for an
evening, till Mrs. Hazleton found me out and
forbade it. * Novels, my dear Miss Faunthorpe,*
she preached, 'are the worst possible reading for
a young woman in your position — enervating the
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE'S DIAEY. 61
mind, weakening the logical faculty, which in your
brain I regret to say is sorely deficient.' I felt
inclined to ask her why she reads novels if they are
so injurious. She has a knack of reading one's
thoughts, and answered my objection before I could
give it expression. Tor the head of a household,
who must always have some portion of care and
anxiety, novel-reading is an innocent relaxation ; but
the instructor of youth should employ her leisure
in widening her circle of knowledge. The books
in the study bookcase are quite at your service.
Miss Faunthorpe, whenever you like to avail
yourself of them,' and then she sailed out of the
room to go to a dinner party, dressed in maroon
velvet and old Brussels lace, and looking very
handsome — for an old woman. She must be five-
and-forty at the least.
Perhaps I ought not to complain of my bondage,
for I might be worse off than I am. Mrs. Hazleton
is fond of preaching, but she is not unkind to me.
She has no grown-up daughters, and whenever she
has company I am asked down to the drawing-room
to play and sing and make myself generally useful ;
62 DEAD men's shoes.
and as she has a good deal of company, this happens
tolerably often. Luckily, music is my strong point.
When Mrs. Hazleton is in a good humour she takes
me for a drive in the park, and I see the world and
hear what is going on. I go to a fashionable church
with the children on Sundays and Saints' days, and
am altogether much better off than in my uncle
Robert's poverty-stricken household, in dull old
Eedcastle, where I knew no one worth knowing,
and where life is only another name for vegetation.
I am sure the cabbages in uncle's wretched kitchen-
garden had quite as much enjoyment of life as
Marion and I — more indeed, for they had sunshine
and perpetual idleness, and bees and butterflies
buzzing and skimming about them, while we had
old house-linen to patch and darn, and the
tradesmen's books to puzzle over, and Jenny to
teach, and mend for, and scold, and puddings to
make, and buttons to sew on from January to
December. I think there never was such a man as
uncle Robert for wrenching the buttons off his
shirts, and pushing his toes through his socks.
So, at the worst, though I have to grind French,
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE'S DIARY. 63
Italian, and German verbs in a mill all the week
through, and listen to those wretched children
strumming Kalkbrenner's exercises three hours a
day, I am better off than Marion. I have forty
pounds a year to spend upon clothes, and I see
a great many nice people. Mrs. Hazleton boasts
that she only knows the best people. 'I am no
tuft-hunter, my dear,' she tells me when she is in
one of her expansive moods. ' You will see very
few titles in my card-basket ; but the people I know
belong to some of the best families in England.'
December 3. — Such a tiresome, dreary week^
Mrs. Hazleton has dined out four evenings out of
six, and now on the fifth she has taken off the
children to see the new actor at the Hay market.
' I am sorry there won't be room for you in the box,
Miss Faunthorpe,' she said, with her chilly polite-
ness, after I had been toiling for an hour helping
Moyson, the children's maid, to tie Lucinda's
ribbons, and brush Laura's hair, and sew on a
tucker for Magdalen. So here I am at half-past
seven o'clock, my hearth swept, and my fire
64 DEAD men's shoes.
made up, as solitary as an old maid with a small
annuity.
I have been down to the study, and chosen a
couple of volumes, the best I could find in a dry-
as-dust collection of antiquities — the ' Citizen of
the World ' and a volume of the Spectator , — but I
don't feel equal to reading either. It suits my
present humour better to scribble my complaints
against fortune in this ridiculous book of mine.
What a lucky woman Mrs. Hazleton is ! Married
to a wealthy Indian judge, and left a widow six
years ago with an ample fortune ; too old to care
about marrying again, but not too old to be admired
and made much of by her friends ; her children
young enough to be kept in the schoolroom for the
next four years. Impossible to imagine a more
independent position. What a contrast between her
fate and mine ! I have never known what it is to
have my own way, and yet, when I was a child, I
thought I had only to be ' grown up ' in order to
taste all the sweets of life. Perhaps that was
because of the nonsense people talked about my
good looks. I can fancy no greater misfortune for
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE'S DIARY. 65
a giii in my position than to be brought up with the
idea of being a beauty. When I was a little thing
people were always drawing comparisons between
Marion and me to Clarion's disadvantage ; and
before I was twelve I knew quite well that I was
the pretty Miss Faunthorpe. Even old Hester,
who never had a civil word for me at the best of
times, used to feed my vanity with her taunts about
my pretty face and my uselessness. ' Handsome is
that handsome does,' she used to say, by which I
knew very well that she thought me handsome.
Then came school, and I was set up as a beauty,
and courted and petted by one-half of the girls,
and detested by the other half, and nagged at by
Marion, who was set against me by the disagreeable
comparisons people were always making between us.
What was the consequence of all this ? I grew up
with the idea that as soon as I left school, some
rich young man, handsome and agreeable into the
bargain, would fall in love with me at first sight,
and that I should be married in grand style at the
parish church — six bridesmaids and ever so many
carriages and pairs — before the admiring eyes of all
VOL. I. F
6Q DEAD men's shoes.
Redcastle. I came home to uncle Robert's dull red
house, prepared for conquest. Life would be like a
fairy tale. Some fine summer morning the hand-
some young prince would appear, and I should
be raised at once from Cinderella's obscurity to
Cinderella's high fortune. Foolish creature that I
was ! I used to lie awake at night telling Marion
the grand things I would do for her when I was
married.
^ Where is the prince to come from, Sib ? ' she
asked me once, rather maliciously. 'You know
there are not above three such young men in
Eedcastle — young Taylor, the lawyer's son; Mr.
Lacy, the biscuit manufacturer ; and George Pins-
ford, the coachmaker.'
' Biscuit manufacturer ! ' I exclaimed. ' Do you
suppose I would marry a low tradesman ? Aren't
there the county families, stupid ? '
Well, here I am, after two weary years' home
life with uncle Eobert, who I must say is the dearest
old thing in the world. Here I am, nearly twenty,
and no nearer finding the prince of fairy lore than
when I left Miss Worrie's establishment for young
SIBYL FAUNTHOKPE S DIAEY. 67
ladies at Kilmorden, after three years' experience as
pupil-teacher. Here I am, a poor drudge of a
governess, at just ten pounds a quarter, thankful for
being asked down to the drawing-room, where my
beauty goes for very little. All Mrs. Hazleton's
friends have found out by this time that I am ' only
the governess/ and have left off asking one another
who I am, as they used to do at first with some
show of interest. I sing, or play, and some one
who has been chattering the whole time says
languidly, 'Yeiy nice, really. Tliank you. Miss
Paunthorpe.' And I sit in the angle between the
back drawing-room fireplace and the window-
curtain for the rest of the evening, watching and
listening, with no more part in what is going on
than if I were at a theatre.
Let me look in the glass and see what this
lauded beauty is which has brought me so little
luck. A small straight nose very sharply cut, a
short upper lip, under lip a thought too full, teeth
good, cliin round and dimpled, face a perfect oval,
eyes darkest brown ; the sort of eyes which, I
believe, are usually called black. Hair dark brown,
68 DEAD men's shoes.
with a tinge of gold where it ripples — the colour
usually called chestnut. Present expression discon-
tent and a tendency to ill temper.
I have given up that foolish notion of a rich
husband, but I sometimes indulge in another day-
dream, perhaps just as foolish. What if my rich
uncle, Stephen Trenchard, were to come home, take
a fancy to me, and leave me a fortune ? Such things
have happened. I remember how my poor mother
used to talk of her brother Stephen, the Indian
merchant, and of the ship that was coming home to
bring her ease and comfort, and which never came.
Will the ship come home for me, I wonder, now
that my poor mother has been lying ten years in
iier quiet grave ?
December 13. — The most wonderful thing has
happened — the most unlooked-for, the most extra-
ordinary. My heart beats so fast at the mere
thought of it, that I am almost breathless as I write
these lines. My hand trembles, and the letters look
blurred and dim before my eyes.
I have seen the son of Philip Secretan, my uncle
SIBYL FAUXTHOKPE'S DIARY. 69
Stephen's deadly enemy — the man whom he sup-
planted in the affections of a weak old father — for
surely any father must be weak who would dis-
inherit his son in favour of a dependant, the man
from whom he received the injury that lamed him for
life. How often have I heard my mother tell the
story, always putting her brother's conduct in the
most favourable li^ht ! He was honest, indefati-
gable, steady — a favourite clerk in the firm of
Secretan Brothers, Manchester merchants. He fully
deserved the unexpected fortune that came to him,
while Philip's dissipation and, extravagance were
justly rewarded by disinheritance. Yet somehow
in spite of poor mamma's special pleading, my
sympathy was always with this unfortunate Mr.
Secretan, who saw his father's w^ealth pass into the
possession of his father's confidential clerk.
I once asked mamma what kind of a man this
Philip Secretan \A'as. She told me that she had only
seen him once in her life, but that he impressed her
as being remarkably handsome and a perfect
gentleman.
And now I have seen his son, Captain Secretan.
70 DEAD men's shoes.
He was at Mrs. Hazleton's party last niglit. I had
no idea who he was till afterwards. He was
standing before the fireplace in the back drawing-
room when I went back to my corner after singing
'Porghi Amor/ standing with his back to the fire
talking to old Colonel Syceman. He is tall and
strong-looking, and has, to my mind, a most
beautiful countenance. I never called a man beau-
tiful before, and I dare say I shall laugh at the
expression when I read over this stupid diary some
day ; but I cannot call his face less than beautiful.
It is such a nobl^ face, with just the grand
look I could fancy in Achilles. I was reading
Pope's ' Iliad ' to the children this afternoon, and
I thought of Captain Secretan every time Achilles
spoke. It seemed to me almost as if I could
see him standing up before me, confronting
Agamemnon. He is dark, with boldly cut features,
a good-humoured expression about the mouth, and
a somewhat dreamy look in the dark gray eyes. I
have seen handsomer faces, but none that ever
interested me as deeply. He is a man I should
believe in with all my soul if he were my friend ;
SIBYL FAUNTHOKPE'S DIAKY. 71
a man I should lean upon as on a rock of defence
if lie were of my kindred. But he is nothing to
me, and I am hardly likely to see him again.
Mrs. Hazleton spoke of him at luncheon to-day
as a foolish young fellow who has sold his com-
mission, and whose future career must be disastrous
unless some distant relations were to die and leave
him their property. As a rule, distant relations are
not so obliging. She spoke with her reverential
tone of his family, which is one of the oldest in
Hampshire, although his grandfather w^as a ^lan-
chester merchant ; and she informed me that his
first cousin, once removed, is a baronet, Sir Douglas
Secretan, with a large estate in somewhere or other.
I wonder whether I shall ever see him again.
December 30.— I have seen him again, three,
four, five, six, seven times. Three times in Mrs.
Hazleton's drawing-room, three times in the park,
when I was out walking with the children ; and
once in Desmond Street when I had gone out alone
to post a letter.
I dare say it was very wrong, and that I shall be
72 DEAD men's shoes.
ashamed of myself when I read over this dreadful
diary, but when Captain Secretan asked me whether
I ever walked in the park with the children, I said
yes ; and when he asked me what time, I said
between three and five; and after that, when he
asked me if I ever went out alone, I told him yes,
sometimes, just before half-past five, to post my
home letter.
How kind he is ! how clever ! how interesting !
and how well we seem to know each other, though
we have only met seven times ! There is evidently
no association for him in the name of Faunthorpe.
This is only natural, as my mother did not marry
till some years after her brother's quarrel with
Philip Secretan. How much I regret, now, that I
did not learn the exact particulars of that quarrel !
I have only a vague idea of the circumstances ; but
from what my mother told me, I know that,
although Philip Secretan was the sufferer, my uncle
Stephen was as vindictive as if he also had been
injured.
Perhaps the injurer is sometimes more angry
than the injured.
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE S DIARY. 76
My mother always declared that her brother was
innocent of guile or wrong-doing from first to last,
but now that I know Mr. Secretan's son I feel stiU.
more inclined to side with my uncle's enemy.
He, Captain Secretan, has told me the history of
his life, his careless happy youth spent abroad, with
a father and mother whom he idolized. He was
educated at Heidelberg, came from Heidelberg to
Woolwich, to an army tutor, joined his regiment at
twenty, and sold out after five years' ser\dce, a few
months ago. He has now all the woild before him,
he says, and has only to choose a career. He is
energetic and clever, and can hardly miss success in
anything he may attempt.
How changed our walks seem, now that there is
always the chance of meeting him ! As I see him
coming to meet us along the wintry avenue, the
familiar scene seems to grow beautiful, the sun shines
brighter, the birds break out into singing. They
may have been singing [before, perhaps, and I too
absorbed to hear them ; but it seems as if they
began a glad chorus at his coming. I did not think
that winter afternoons could be so beautiful ; the
74 DEAD men's shoes.
calm still air, the blue-gray sky, the black tracery of
the tall elm trees against the yellow sunset.
He told me yesterday that his father would have
been a rich man, but for the treachery of a friend
whom he had loved and trusted. A cold sick feeling
came over me, just as if the treachery had been
mine, and I had suddenly come face to face with my
victim.
' The only lesson my father ever taught me was
to revile that man's name, and to carry my hatred
of him with me to the grave. An evil lesson for a
kind-hearted man to teach, you'll say ; but for all
that, I don't believe there ever beat a kinder heart
than my father's.'
I can easily believe this. Kindness and sweet
temper are Captain Secretan's chief characteristics ;
a bright good humour which cheers one like sun-
shine. A way of looking at life on the pleasantest
side which would inspire hopefulness in the most
dismal mind. I know how low-spirited, discontent-
ed, and wretched I was growing just before I knew
him, and how changed and brightened life seems to
me now.
SIBYL FAUNTHOKPES DIAEY. 7o
The children doat upon him, and are as pleased a?
I am to meet him in our walks. He talks to them
about all their small pleasures, and is able to inte-
rest himself in their ideas much better than I, who
spend my life wdth them. Sometimes he paces up
and down the broad walk with the three girls
hanging about him, telling them one of the fairy
tales we all know so well, and he has a way of
giving a new charm and interest to the old stories,
while his little touches of modern slang come in
here and there with the funniest effect, and set us
off laughing till the tree-tops seem to shake with
our laughter.
' How odd that we should meet you again to-day,
Captain Secretan !' cried Magdalen the day before
yesterday, when we found him at the entrance of
the broad walk.
' Not at all odd, if you insist on coming this way,
little one,' he said. * This is my afternoon con-
stitutional. But if you very much object I'll take
the other side of the park.'
' Oh, no, no, please come always,' shouted the
three ; and then they asked for Cinderella, Captain
76 DEAD men's shoes.
Secretan's modernized Cinderella, wliose ball dress
was made in New Bond Street, and whose cruel
step-mother had a box on the second tier at Covent
Garden.
It was yesterday afternoon that I met him in
Desmond Street, a dreary drizzling afternoon, which
made me think the sooner the year came to an end
the better. I had been feeling rather depressed and
disheartened all the morning. The children had all
gone to a morning performance of the pantomime at
Drury Lane, and I had the day to myself, as Mrs.
Hazleton graciously informed me. I don't think
leisure is an unalloyed good for those who have few
pleasant thoughts to brighten their solitude. I sat
mending my clothes, and thinking about Captain
Secretan. My thoughts were not happy ones. I
was shocked to find what a hold this stranger had
taken upon my mind, and how difficult it was for
me to think of any one else, or to imagine my life
without him. Yet I knew that he was nothing,
and never could be anything to me. Poor, but
proud, and of good birth, moving in what Mrs.
Hazleton calls the best society, he will naturally
SIBYL FAUXTHOEPLS DIARY. 77
select a woman of fortune for his wife. He is
handsome, agreeable, has many gifts which dis-
tinguish him from the common run of young men,
and will have no difficulty in making an advan-
tageous marriage. Of an obscure littlt; pauper like
me he would never think seriously for a moment,
unless his thoughts were dishonourable ; and I know
him and trust him well enough already to wager my
life against that. ^Vhat has he to do with me, then,
or I with him ? Absolutely nothing. AYe are only
fooling each other by this friendship, which is so
sweet to me, and which must needs have some
charm for him, since he takes the trouble to cul-
tivate it. Better for both of us that we should see
each other no more, or only upon the public stage
of Mrs. Hazleton's drawing-room. I will tell him
so seriously and honestly the next time we are
alone together for a minute or two, while the three
girls march on before us. This doesn't often happen,
for I think Lucinda is more deeply in love with the
captain than ! What was I going to write ?
Than a girl of twelve ought to be. This is the
lecture which I read myself yesterday while I
78 DEAD men's shoes.
worked at that tiresome mending. All my
Christmas quarter's salary will go for a black silk
dress, as I must have one good and fashionably
made gown to wear downstairs. I wanted so much
to have sent uncle Robert a little present, and I
should have liked to buy Marion a winter hat ; but
that is out of the question. Shall I have my dress
made with flounces, or a trained skirt ?
It was dark when I went out to post my letter ;
dark, and wet, and uncomfortable, and there was
nothing farther from my thoughts than the idea of
meeting Captain Secretan between Lowther Street
and the post office, though I am bound to confess
that the captain himself was not very far from my
thoughts. I had posted my letter, and was coming
away from the office, when a tall man, looking very
big in a great rough overcoat, crossed the road and
came towards me. I knew him in a moment, but a
strange shy feeling came over me, and I walked on
ever so fast, pretending not to know him. The
street is quiet and lonely, and I heard his footsteps
hurrying after me.
' Do you always walk like a sporting pedestrian
SIBYL fa^u^^thokpe's diaky. 79
when you are alone, Miss Faunthorpe ? ' he asked,
coming by my side.
I started a little at the sound of his voice,
although I knew so well that he was there.
Yesterday was one of my nervous days, I suppose.
I said something about its being such a disagree-
able evening.
' Yes/ he answered, with his good-tempered
laugh, ' the old year is making himself as obnoxious
as he can in order that we may not regret him. It
is rather unpleasant weather. You dislike this
drizzling rain I dare say. I rather like it, for it
reminds me of grouse-shooting in the Higiilands.
I was even going to ask you to take a little walk
round Eccleston Square before you go back to your
schoolroom.'
' I couldn't think of such a thing,' I answered,
sharply, feeling that the proposal was an im-
pertinence.
' Couldn't you ? Then it wasn't right in me to
propose it, I suppose,' he replied, placidly. 'And
yet I should be so glad of half an hour's quiet talk
with you. It's very nice telling the children fairy
80 DEAD men's shoes.
stories, but rather a hindrance to conversation.
Well, we'll postpone tlie walk round the square till
we've pleasanter weather and you know me better.
Do you know I have been thinking of you so much
in the last few days."
Had he ? There must be something sympathetic
in our thousjhts then, for he has never been out of
mine.
We had turned into Lowther Street by this time,
and I was weak enough to be glad that it is such a
long street. I would not have gone three yards out
of my way with him if the happiness of my life
had depended on it, but there was no harm in letting
him walk as far as Mrs. Hazleton's door with me.
* Yes, I have been thinking about you a good deal,
Miss Faunthorpe,' he said, after a pause. ' I have
been thinking what might have happened if I had
been a rich man and free to follow my own incli-
nation. '
This was telling me plainly that he was neither
rich nor free.
* Can you guess what I fancied would have hap-
pened in that case ? '
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE'S DIARY. 81
* No, indeed.'
' I thought it just possible that I might have been
tempted to ask jou to be my wife.'
He waited for my reply, but I was dumb, I
felt choking, and could not find a word to answer
him.
' What would you have said in that case ? '
Some diabolical counsellor suggested a flippant
answer instead of a serious one.
'Isn't your question rather like Lord Dundreary's ?
I asked. ' If you had had a brother, do you think
lie would have liked cheese ? '
* I see,' he said, with a disappointed tone, ' I am
not to expect a serious answer to a hypothetical
question. I dare say you are right, Miss Faunthorpe.
In all life's delicate questions women are always
wiser than men.'
I thought that he had taken the easiest way of
telling me that his circumstances forbade him Ui
think of manying me.
* In that case,' I said to myself, ' he has no right
to waylay me as I come from the post ; ' and I tried
to feel very angry with him.
VOL. 1. G
82 DEAD men's shoes.
' So you didn't go liome to spend your Christmas
holidays ? ' he said presently.
* Home ! Do you suppose I could afford to travel
to Yorkshire and back for a week's pleasure ? Be-
sides, I have no real home. My sisters and I are
dependent on my uncle's bounty, and he is only a
parish doctor, v^ho finds it a hard thing to pay his
butcher and baker.'
I was determined to let him know how poor I am,
and how wise he has been in coming to the conclu-
sion that I am no wife for him.
' Poor little thing.' he said compassionately, and
his pity did me good somehow. It did not gall, as
most people's pity does.
' Poor little girl,' he said again, after a few mo-
ments' silence. 'An orphan, and sent out into the
world to bear the burden of servitude and all ill-
usage " that patient merit from the unworthy takes."
One would suppose that you could hardly be worse
off than you are at present ? '
This was not very cheering, but I said nothing.
We were near Mrs. Hazleton's door by this time,
and yet we had been walking slowly.
SIBYL FAUXTHOKPE's DIARY. 83
' Any change would be for the better, one would
think,' he said, musingly. 'A change that would
give this poor little waif a sworn protector and
defender,— a husband pledged to toil for her and
cherish her. But a poor husband — a man at war
with fortune — bah I 111 tell you what it is, Miss
Faunthorpe,' he burst out suddenly, 'with your
lovely face you ought to make a brilliant marriage.'
' So I was told when I was sixteen,' said I, ' but
I'm almost twenty, and the fairy prince in the shape
of a rich husband hasn't appeared yet.'
* You wouldn't despise an eligible opportunity of
exchansinor Mrs. Hazleton's schoolroom for a house
in Kensington Palace Gardens, I suppose ? You
have a feminine inclination for fine clothes, servants
with powdered heads, carriages and horses, and a
box at the opera ? '
" I am human, and I don't pretend to be superior
to the weaknesses of humanity,' I answered, feeling
that I was making myself intensely disagreeable.
He provoked me, somehow, by his nonchalant
manner of discussing my position and prospects.
Luckily, we were quite at the door now, and I was
84 DEAD men's shoes.
able to beat a retreat before anything still more
unpleasant had been said upon either side.
* Good afternoon. Captain Secretan,' I said.
' It must be good-bye,' he answered, ' I am going
into Norfolk to-morrow for a month's shooting.'
I felt as if he had said that he was going to Aus-
tralia, but I only answered ' Oh, in that case, good-
bye;' and so we shook hands again, and then he
lifted his hat and went away, while I gave the bell
a good sharp pull that insured its being answered
promptly.
I don't quite know whether I like him or hate
him ; but whichever feeling it is, it must be rather
strong of its kind, as I cannot get him out of my
thoughts. I am inclined to think that it is hatred.
What could be more disagreeable or humiliating
than his way of speaking about me before my
face, as if I had been miles away? 'Poor thing,
poor little waif ! '
I grow hot and red when I think of it.
Jan. 14. — The year is just a fortnight old. There
has been snow, but bright clear weather, a blue sky.
SIBYL fauxthorpe's diaey. 85
and sunshine. We walk in Kensincrton Gardens
every day, and meet him every day. He makes the
three girls run races with their hoops, he being
umpire, and during the race he and I are able to
talk without restraint. He only stopped four days
in Norfolk. He told me that the shooting was very
good, but that he was bored to death after the second
day, and yet it was in a pleasant country house that
he was staying at, according to his own account.
There was to be a ball the very day after he came
away, but he did not care to stay for it. Curious
man !
]\Iy black silk dress has come, and is a great
success. I dread to see the dressmaker's bill, as I
have only reserved a sovereign for the making, and
I am afraid she will charfTe me somethincr nearer
o o
three. The dress certainly fits to perfection, and is
beautifully finished ; the trimmings simple, but of the
best quality. At home, Marion and I used to make
our own dresses, but after going nearly out of my
mind for a week over piping-cord and button-holes,
I always felt myself a dowdy at the last.
Mrs. Hazleton has a dinner party to-morrow,
86 DEAD men's shoes.
Captain Secretan is coming in the evening, and I
shall wear my new dress. Have I made np my
mind yet whether I like him or hate him?
Yes. I do neither. I love him — love him —
love him.
There, it is written at last. Foolish old diary, how
I shall despise you and myself some day when I
read over this wretched page !
Jan. 16. — Such a delicious party last night ! Cap-
tain Secretan was the first person I saw when I
slipped quietly in at the back drawing-room door.
He was watching the door, and those dark eyes
brightened at sight of me. I sang to him, I played
to him, I talked to him, the party was all him. The
rest of the people were only the medium through
which I saw him, — or they were like trees in a land-
scape, and he the living figure in the foreground. I
know he likes to talk to me, and to hear me sing or
play ; but I wonder whether he loves me,
Feb. 3. — It has come at last. He has aked me
plainly, straightforwardly, anxiously, earnestly, to be
his wife.
SIBYL fauxthokpe's diaey. 87
He has told me that he is poor, that he is living
just now on the money he got for his commission.
He has nothing else, but he has youth, health, and
strength, some talents, and he is willing to work.
With a wife whom he fondly loved he would have a
motive for beginning a new career.
' I'm such a happy-go-lucky fellow,' he said, in
his bright, cheery way, 'that I can hardly bring
myseK to put my shoulder to the wheel for my own
sake, but if I had you to work for, pet, I should
slave like a Goliath.'
1 don't like to remind him that the Philistine
soldier was more remarkable for strength than
industry.
He made me say yes, and promise whatever he
liked. How could I resist him, when I love him
so dearly that the lightest touch of his hand makes
me tremble ? and there seems to me more pathos in
his voice than in the tenderest phrase of Mozart's.
He is so straightforward, so candid, so noble. He
wanted to take Mrs. Hazleton into his confidence
immediately, so that I might be married very quietly
from her house.
88 DEAD men's shoes.
' We have nothing to wait for, darling/ he said,
' nnless we were to wait till I have made a fortune,
which would mean at least half a dozen years of
severance, — ^just the brightest, happiest years of life
sacrificed to a sordid scruple, an unworthy doubt of
Providence. If you love me, Sibyl, you will not talk
of waiting.'
'I should like to be wise and prudent,' I told
him, ' but your impetuosity carries me along like a
torrent.'
' Love is a torrent,' answered he, ' do not oppose
so poor a thing as reason against its sacred might.'
I entreated him to say nothing to Mrs. Hazleton.
An idea had occurred to me which made me hesitate,
even with my lover's hand clasping mine, as to the
wisdom of yielding to his prayer.
I remembered a strange fact, which had almost
slipped out of my mind lately. I remembered that
Alexis Secretan is the natural inheritor of his father's
hatred, the natural enemy of my rich uncle, Stephen
Trenchard, the uncle from whom I have been taught
to expect a fortune. If I marry Captain Secretan,
I surrender all hope of favour from my uncle.
SIBYL fauxthorpe's diaey. 89
I begged Alex — he has taught me to call him
Alex — to say nothing to Mrs. Hazleton yet awhile.
I wanted time to think.
After all, this hope of fortune from my uncle
Stephen may be only a dream, vain as that idea of a
rich husband with which I used to delude myself
when I was a school girl. On the other hand, I have
the knowledge from my poor mother that my uncle
was a very rich man twenty years ago (I have the
knowledge from his last letter to my uncle Robert,
enclosing a twenty-pound bank bill as a present for
Marion and me) ; that he has never married, and has
no intention of marrying ; that he looks forward to
returning to his native country in a few years and
making the acquaintance of his nieces. Too good a
chance in all this, surely, to be thrown away. It
would be rather a bitter thing for me to see Marion
chosen for her uncle's heiress, while I was left a
pauper.
What am I to do ? How am I to choose
between Alexis and the possibility of a large for-
tune ?
Prudence suggests that I should only pledge
90 DEAD men's shoes.
myself to Alexis on condition that our marriage
shall be deferred for some years.
We are both young. We can afford to wait
a few years, and yet have a good deal of the bright-
ness of life before us. My uncle Stephen is an
old man, older no doubt at his age than men
who have spent their lives in Europe. Whether
I am to inherit any portion of his wealth is
a question that must be decided in a few years.
I must tell Alex that he must wait. If his
love is real and earnest it cannot be lessened by
time.
Feh. 5. I have told him my decision. Vain,
hopeless, to talk of reason with a man whose in-
clination is his only law. He tells me that if I
really cared for him I could not propose dreary
years of separation. My statement that I have
rich relatives who may leave me money if I marry
to please them, and are sure to leave me nothing
if I marry without their consent, fell on ears ob-
stinately deaf to reason. Love like this is worse
than a torrent — it is a maelstrom. Prudence,
SIBYL FAUXTHOEPE'S DIAKY. 91
reason, worldly wisdom, are mere straws in the
whirlpool. I must see him no more.
Feb. 7. I have seen him again. Poor Alex !
He looks so unhappy. How sweet to know that
I have such power over him ! — I, to whom he
seemed such a far-off creature two months ago.
Is the chance of fortune w^orth such a love as
his?
Feb. 8. Stephen Trenchard may live to be as
old as Old Parr, and leave his money to the Asylum
for Idiots, after I have sacrificed youth and love
and all that is sweetest in life to the sordid hope
of fortune.
Feb. 9. A hopelessly w^et day. I have seen
him walk up and down the street three times in
the rain. I know his dear umbrella.
Feb. 11. In the Broad Walk again yesterday.
It is all settled. I am to give Mrs, Hazleton a
month's notice to-morrow — our agreement is a
month's notice on either side — in the event of my
92 DEAD men's shoes.
proving inefficient, she said. Not in the event of my
not liking the situation. Oh dear no, of course not.
I am so agitated that I can hardly write. This
day month I am to have my boxes packed, and
go quietly away in a cab at ten o'clock in the
morning, drive to the station and deposit my lug-
gage, and then meet Alexis, with whom I shall
drive back to the quietest little church in Eccles-
tonia, where we are to be married, No witnesses
but the pew-opener and the clerk ; no announce-
ment in the Times. The secret of our marriage
kept from everybody who knows us, at the outset,
at any rate, so that if Stephen Trenchard dies in
India — a likely thing after all — I may still inherit
my share of his fortune. Dear old uncle Eobert
is such an easy-going man, that as long as I tell
iiim I am comfortably situated with my employer
he will never put himself out of the way to know
more. He has not an acquaintance in London
whom he could ask to call upon me at Mrs.
Hazleton's. There is no such isolation as poverty.
I have arranged Avith Jane Dimond, the under
housemaid, about my letters. She will receive any
SIBYL FAUXTHORPE'S DIARY. 93
that come to Lowther Street for me, and post any
that I send her to be posted. I have given her
quite a heap of things, the weeding out of my
wardrobe, and made her my friend for life.
March 11. To-morrow is to be my wedding day.
Oh fearful day I on which hangs all my life to
come. WiU the future be blessed or accursed for
to-morrow's vows ?
I wish Marion and uncle Eobert could have
been with me. It would all have seemed more
real. I remember my foolish fancies — my castles
in the air. The grand wedding at which I used
to see myself figuring as chief performer ; my white
satin dress and Brussels flounces ; the carriages ;
the favours ; the crowd ; Mendelssohn's Wedding
March; the joyous peal of beUs. Those beUs are
sounding in my ears to-night.
To-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow ! Before noon
to-morrow I shall have ceased to be Sibyl Faun-
thorpe. My name will be Sibyl Secretan — name
of all others most abhorrent to my uncle, Stephen
Trenchard.
CHAPTEE VI.
THE ELITE OF REDCASTLE.
Eedcastle is a country town. It is not a manu-
facturing town, or a seaport, or a garrison town, or
a settlement in any manner designed to be of
wide and general use to society. It exists for
itself alone, and is exclusive to a fault. It is on
the high road to nowhere. Erase it from the map
of England to-morrow, and nobody but its own
inhabitants would be the worse off for its evanish-
ment. It produces nothing but elderly people with
limited incomes, and scandal. For the cultivation
of this last article Eedcastle is like a mushroom
bed in a cellar, a dark corner of the land in which
fungi abound and flourish.
It is not a bad town in which to enjoy a brief
span of repose from the turmoil and bustle of the
industrial and commercial world ; — the world of
labour and pleasure, profit, loss, and pain. Not a
THE ELITE OF EEDCASTLE. 95
bad old town in which to dream away a joyless,
painless old age. But to live in Eedcastle, to
bound one's hopes within its brick and mortar
confines, to regulate one's life by its petty pro-
prieties and narrow creed ! Heaven pity that wretch
to whom destiny flings the lot of life-long bondage
in Eedcastle.
It is a clean old town. Scarcely in laborious
Holland, where the servant maids scrub the chim-
ney-pots and pipe clay the gutters, would you
find a cleaner. A rainy day, which makes mud
and slush in busier places, only washes down and
renovates Eedcastle. The one wide street, with
its massive old brick houses, square, and strong,
and substantial — the historic gateway, which
divides the one street into two. Below Bar and
Above Bar — and the fine old Coach and Horses
Inn, where seldom coaches or horses are seen to
stop, the inn which, save for the mildest indulgence
in billiards, and brandy and soda among the youth
of the town, seems to exist rather as a part and
parcel of Eedcastle, an institution essential to the
honour and glory of the town, than for any com-
96 DEAD men's shoes.
mercial purpose, since it appears morally impossible
that the establishment can be self-supporting, — all
these are the pink of cleanliness. The pretty little
minster, more architecturally perfect than many a
grander fane, looks as if it were kept under a glass
shade. The market-place presents on off days a
broad expanse of spotless pavement blinking and
smiling up at the sun. The turnpike road on
which Eedcastle lies is one of the best in
Yorkshire; the narrow lanes and by-streets
leading up to that broad stretch of common land
known as Eedcastle Woods, apparently for the
sole reason that it is barren of anything taller than
a hazel-bush, are innocent of mud or smoke. The
scanty suburbs of the town present a sprinkling of
smallish houses, for the most part uninteresting of
aspect, but all scrupulously clean. Those modern
edifices, the Wesley an Chapel, the Independent
Chapel, and that masonic temple the Athena
Lodge, are of whitest freestone, with shining
windows, and hearthstoned steps embellishing
their classic porticoes.
Eedcastle, producing nothing, and offering no
THE ELITE OF REDCASTLE. 97
attraction to visitors, is naturally not a wealthy
settlement. The rich inhabitants of Redcastle can
be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Yet
there is perhaps no town in England in which
respect for wealth is more deeply implanted in the
human mind. It is a saying of the profane that
twopence halfpenny will not consort with twopence
in Eedcastle, but this is not a true saying, for more
than it worships wealth does Eedcastle worship
appearances, and if A, with twopence, can put on
the semblance of threepence, he shall be assuredly
held higher than C, who lacks the art to obtain as
much show out of twopence halfpenny.
The elite of Eedcastle — that is to say, persons
of fixed income or established professional earn-
ing, ranging from eight to eighteen hundred per
annum — live within a narrow circle. The houses
immediately below Bar, and the houses immediately
above Bar, shelter the aristocracy of the town.
Below Bar, grave old red-brick houses of the early
Georgian period, roomy, and comfortable within,
respectable of aspect without ; above Bar, houses
of a more modern date, stone facades, French
VOL. L H
98 DEAD men's shoes.
windows, porches, verandalis, larger gardens, and
ostentatious stabling, rarely used, save for the
accommodation of a pony chaise, like one of
Falstaff's buck baskets.
Within this charmed circle, in the largest of
the stone-fronted houses above Bar, resides Colonel
Stormont, who enjoys the privileges of retirement
and half-pay, cheered by the society of his wife and
family, the family consisting of a grown-up son
and two grown-up daughters who, of various views
upon other questions, are at one in the opinion
that Eedcastle was called into being for their
especial behoof, and who regulate their conduct by
that idea.
Colonel and Mrs. Stormont take the lead in
Eedcastle society. Their names are at the head of
the croquet and archery club, which black-balls
every one who is suspected of having once had a
cousin connected with trade. They are chief
patrons of the assize and masonic balls. They
sanctify the more chaste and classic of the
Eedcastle concerts with their august presence, or,
at least, Mrs. Stormont allows her name to grace
THE ELITE OF REDCASTLE. 99
the list of patronesses, and add a lustre to the
programme of the evening's harmony. If St.
Cecilia had come to life again she could hardly
have been in more request among the concert -
givers than Mrs. Stormont, who scarcely knows
Mozart from Offenbach, or Beethoven from Brinley
Eichards.
To offend Colonel and Mrs. Stormont would be
to be at war with Eedcastle ; and it is doubtful if
any one so unfortunately placed could continue to
reside in the town. He would be obliged to depart,
exiled by that awful ban ; like Ovid from Eome,
or Dante from Florence.
In the large stucco-fronted house with the
Norman turret resides Mr. Marlin Spyke, the great
shipbuilder of Krampston-on-Tybur. Mr. and
Mrs. Spyke live with some splendour, but a self-
contained kind of life, not conducive to wide
popularity. They receive very little company, their
names grace the subscription list of no local charity,
they patronize no local entertainment, they attend
no masonic or benevolent ball. They are negatively
great, and will be remembered when they are
100 DEAD men's shoes.
dead for the many noble deeds they have not
done. •
After the Storraonts and the Marlin Spykes
come the professional classes below Bar; Mr. Jew-
son, the chief local solicitor and vestry clerk; Dr.
Mitsand, an elderly man of some distinction, being
one of the army surgeons who endured and ame-
liorated the miseries of the Crimean war; Mr.
Groshen, the banker; Mr. Farrer, the curate; and
a few others, whom it is needless to particularize.
On the outskirts of the town reside three or four
gentlemen who derive their income from houses or
lands, are more rustic in their bearing and attire
than the inhabitants of the citadel, and in a gene-
ral way give themselves airs, as affecting to belong
to the county families. Afar off in their various
fastnesses, isolated, inaccessible, unapproachable, live
the county families. A few of them are on visiting
terms with the Stormonts, Dr. Mitsand, and the
clergy of Eedcastle; but they regard the town
otherwise as a depot for groceries and draperies, and
a centre of Radicalism for the lower classes. Their
big family landaus, with tall, slab-sided horses and
THE ELITE OF EEDCASTLE. 101
brass harness, pervade the street on fine afternoons ;
their sons trot briskly through the quiet to^Yn on
hunting mornings in well-worn pink. They turn out
occasionally for a concert, and take care to testify
l)y loud talk and laughter among themselves, and
a supercilious contemplation of the rest of the
audience through eye-glasses, that they hold them-
selves as creatures apart from the townspeople.
Within ten miles of Eedcastle is that thriving
seaport, Krampston-on-Tybur, famous for ship-build-
ing, ropemaking, linseed crushing, sugar baking,
and general exportation and importation. Kramp-
ston has noisy, busthng streets, miles of quays,
labyrinths of docks, drawbridges that arrest the
pedestrian at every turn, so intersected is the
land by narrow inlets of water. Krampston
has very little * society,' in the Eedcastle sense of
that word, but it has commercial activity, the
vigorously throbbing pulse of active and useful
life, name, and place and power in the world. The
word ' KJrampston ' branded on bale or packing-case
is familiar in Buenos Ayres or Sierra Leone, in
Pernambuco or Timbuctoo, while the name of
102 DEAD men's shoes,
Eedcastle is hardly known out of the post office
or British Gazetteer.
Among the elite of Eedcastle — the archons — the
equestrian order — Eobert Faunthorpe, surgeon and
parish doctor, has no place. The elite give him
good-day when they meet him trudging toilfully
above or below Bar, or trotting meekly along one
of the lanes on his unkempt pony. Good, easy-
going little man, ever ready to help the helpless to
whom he ministers, often squeezing a shilling or a
sixpence out of his ill-furnished purse where he
feels that drugs alone are of no avail. Kindly
gentleman though he is, the elite of Eedcastle
cannot recognise him as a member of their order.
He lives in a shabby red house at the fag-end of
the town, grooms his pony, digs in the garden,
keeps one old woman-servant of eccentric aspect;
he takes snuff inordinately — perhaps it is his only
consolation — and the normal shabbiness of his
clothes is enhanced by the process. His existence
is altogether unorthodox. He is beyond the pale.
True that he has reared three orphan nieces,
the children of a brother who died penniless ten
THE ELITE OF EEDCASTLE. 103
years ago ; and it is hardly to be supposed that
this act of benevolence has not cost him as much
as the maintenance of a groom and gardener. But
Eedcastle cannot recognise these small charities.
They judge a man as they judge his house, by the
front which he presents to the world. They would
recognise the groom and gardener as elements of
social status. They smile gently at the idea of
the three orphan nieces as a harmless eccentricity
of that eccentric little man, Dr. Faunthorpe.
Happily Eobert Faunthorpe, M.R.C.S., and Dr.
by courtesy, is of all men the last to regret that
social heaven to which he has never ascended. He
sees Colonel and Mrs. Stormont, Dr. Mitsand, and
Mr. and Mrs. Groshen revolving in their orbits as he
sees the planets, and envies them no more. The
idea that they do him any unkindness by not in-
viting him to their dinner parties, by not extending
the hand of friendship to his fatherless nieces, never
enters his mind. He is so simple-minded a little
man that he is content to go his way and let other
people go theirs.
An eccentric, evidently, as Eedcastle opines.
CHAPTER VII.
DRIFTING INTO HAVEN.
It is a soft, calm evening, early in April, and Br.
Faunthorpe's shabby old house is as much bright-
ened by the westering sunlight as it can be bright-
ened by anything less than the three coats of paint
for which its worm-eaten woodwork has been lan-
guishing for the last twenty years. There has not
been a five- pound note expended upon the repair
or the beautification of Eobert Faunthorpe's house
within the memory of the oldest inhabitant of Eed-
castle. It is scrupulously clean, and that is the best
that can be said of it. There is a small garden in
front, where flourish those homely perennials which
demand little care and no artificial nutriment, —
lupins, Canterbury bells, flags, London pride, poly-
anthuses, primroses, and wall-flowers. Behind the
house there is a long strip of ground where the
surgeon cultivates cabbages and potatoes, leeks and
DRIFTING IN'TO HAVEN. 105
potherhs, leaving only two narrow borders for flori-
culture. Happily there are ancient rose bushes in
these neglected borders, — rose bushes from which
Beauty's father might have gathered those large red
cup-shaped cabbage roses that grow in a child's pic-
ture book. The borders are edged with box, tall and
thick, — box that has been growing for a century.
The low red walls, crumbling into hollows where the
birds have pecked at the brickwork, crowned with
dragon's-mouth, stonecrop, and houseleek, would be
delicious in a picture, and are not unlovely in reality.
At the bottom of this long narrow garden there is a
patch of ground set apart for the benefit of Scrub,
the pony, upon which grow purple-flowered tares,
three crops in a twelvemonth sometimes.
Within, the house has a certain air of homely
comfort. The shabby old furnitui-e has that well-
w^orn look which in some wise endears goods and
chattels to their owners. Beeswax and labour have
done their best to brighten and beautify the ancient
mahogany bureaus, the clumsy walnutwood bed-
steads and tables, — made at a time when walnut-
wood was almost as cheap as deal. Cracked old jars
106 DEAD men's shoes.
and bottles of common blue delf adorn the tall
narrow wooden mantelpieces; curtains of watered
moreen, once crimson, but faded to a tawny brown,
drape the deeply recessed windows of parlour and
surgery. The rooms are spacious, but low ; the ceil-
ings sustained by massive beams painted black. The
walls are for the most part paneled, and the pan-
eling has been painted a dingy pink or a dirty
drab. To keep this paneling spotless is the old
servant's anxious care, and much house-flannel and
soft soap are expended thereupon to Dr. Faun-
thorpe's aggravation, — that good easy man having
no passion for cleanliness in the abstract.
A wide stone passage leads from the front door to
the half-glass door opening into the back garden,
thus letting light and air through the old house. A
clumsy mahogany-framed barometer, a row of hat-
pegs, and a faded map of England are the only furni-
ture of this passage, or hall, as a modern house-agent
would call it. A roomy, solid old staircase, with
shallow treads, and ponderous balusters, leads to
the upper chambers, which are numerous and of fair
size. To the right of the front door is the parlour,
DRIFTING INTO HAVEN. 107
on the left the surgery. Behind the surgery is the
best parlour; behind the every-day parlour is the
large stone-paved kitchen.
For this house, with its acre of garden, Dr. Faun-
thorpe pays twenty pounds a year ; so there is some
saving of house-rent in residence at Eedcastle, if
your soul aspires not after any higher state than
comfortable vegetation, and you are content to in-
habit the inferior end of the town.
Dr. Faunthorpe paces his front garden on this
calm April evening, smoking his pipe. He is a
smoker as well as a snuffer, and finds solace in
tobacco after his daily round. This is his hour of
rest and leisure. True that it may be broken in upon
at any moment by some sudden call for his services,
but his regular daily labour, his measured grind
at life's mill, is over.
He prefers the small front garden for his evening
pipe to the larger ground at the back, — first, because
he is to the fore if wanted ; and secondly, because,
his house being on the high road, it is just possible
that something may go by, vehicle or passenger, to
the enlivenment of his leisure.
108 DEAD men's shoes.
He is meditative and silent, but not alone. His
niece Marion, a tall girl with wavy light liair, and
a pre-Eaphaelite figure, stands in a listless attitude
by the gate. His niece Jenny, an overgrown girl of
twelve, with a very short frock and stalwart legs,
encased in brown worsted stockings, is watering the
flowers, and making as much mess as it is possible to
make in the operation.
' Just look what puddles you are making in the
path, stupid,' exclaims the elder sister, peevishly
regarding the efforts of her junior. ' I do wish you'd
leave things alone. You're always up to some mis-
chief or other.'
* I suppose I shouldn't be mischievous if I let the
primroses die for want of water,' remonstrates the
junior, in no wise abashed. * That's what you'd do,
with your laziness and fine-lady ways. You were
bad enough before you went to stay with uncle
Stephen, but you're ever so much worse now. I'm
sure I wish he'd kept you there instead of sending
you back, like a bad penny. Uncle Eobert and I
were as jolly as sandboys while you were away.'
The young person sets down her water-pot and
DKIFTIXG INTO HAVEX. 109
delivers this diatribe with arms akimbo, like Madame
Aaofot's daughter. Marion shudders.
* Sandboys ! What an expression for a young
lady ! ' she ejaculates.
' Pray where's the harm in sandboys ? ' demands
the incorrigible Jenny. 'They're more respectable
than you, as far as I can see, for they get their own
living.'
' My dear/ remonstrates uncle Eobert mildly,
* that is not the way to address your elder sister.'
' Why does she come and loaf about here, then,
with her stuckupishness ? Why doesn't she go and
be a governess like Sibyl ? If she heard what Hester
says of her she'd be ashamed of herself.'
' My love, you have no right to quote Hester.'
' Hester is an impertinent, mischief-making crea-
ture/ exclaims Marion.
* And as to your sister going out as a governess,
my dear,' continues uncle Eobert mildly, ' with her
expectations it would be about the most foolish
thing she could do.'
' Expectations, — dead men's shoes ! ' exclaims the
terrible child, twirling the watering-can so that its
110 DEAD men's shoes.
last drops sprinkle Marion's pretty blue dress. ' I
should hate myself if / was mean enough to calcu-
late upon what any one would leave me.'
' Quite right of you,' says Marion, with a super-
cilious laugh — that sneering schoolgirl laugh, which
we all remember to have been crushed by occasion-
ally in our youth, — ' for certainly no one is likely to
leave you money.'
' I dare say not, with you in the way,' answers
the irrepressible Jenny. They'd feel they were doing
an act of charity bestowing their fortune on you, for
it would be the same as leaving it to the Asylum for
Idiots. One simpleton provided for, at any rate.'
With this the imp swings round upon her heels
as on a pivot, brandishes the watering-pot as an
Indian savage his club, and gallops into the house.
Jane Faunthorpe never walks. She has the action
of an unbroken colt, and seems, when in motion, to
have as many legs as that animal. When she comes
downstairs there is a sound as of a sack of coals
flung from the upper story. How the old house sus-
tains itself under her youthful vigour is a mystery to
the parish doctor.
DRIFTING INTO HAVEN. Ill
' I'd run after her and give her a good box on the
ears/ says Marion, viciously, ' if I didn't want to see
the omnibus go by.'
Tlie omnibus is a stunted covered vehicle, like a
carrier's cart garnished with glazed windows, which
plies between the station and the outskirts of Eed-
castle, and it is nearly time for this conveyance to
pass with its evening freight. There are sometimes
as many as five people arrive by the six o'clock train
from Krampston, — nay, the Krampston train some-
times brings that rare bird, a passenger from London.
' It's a pity you ever sent that child to a day
school, uncle Eobert,' Marion remarks presently,
wiping the waterspots daintily from her dress. ' She
was bad enough before, but now she is simply in-
tolerable.'
' My love, I couldn't afford a boarding school, and
I was obliged to send her somewhere,' replies the
surgeon, in his longsuffering way. 'At home she
was learning only to dig potatoes and to whistle,
neither of which pursuits is an attractive accom-
plishment in a young lady. The child is not bad at
bottom.'
112 DEAD men's shoes. •
' Perhaps not/ answers Marion, snappishly, ' but
the bottom mlast be a long way down. I've never
come to it yet.'
' She is very warm-hearted.'
* Yes, if warmth of heart consists in rushing at
one like an avalanche, hugging one round the neck
like a bear, and rumpling one's collar atrociously,
without the faintest provocation.'
* She is not of an idle disposition,' remonstrates
the uncle. * I found her cleaning the back kitchen
windows at half-past six this morning. JSTo one had
asked her to do it.'
' Of course not. That's just the reason she did it.'
* If you would take a little more pains with her,
Marion/ suggests Dr. Faunthorpe, timidly
'Pains! I might take agonies, and without the
least effect. Didn't I begin to teach her music '
' Yes, my dear, but you didn't go on.'
' Well, you just try to teach her anything, uncle
Eobert — just try — that's all,' says Marion, with
awful significance, and then breaks out with a sigh,
'Oh dear, is this precious old omnibus never
coming ? '
DRTFTING INTO HAVEX. 113
* It is ratlier late, my dear. But as it isn't
going to bring us any one we care about, we needn't
worry ourselves about it.'
' It would be something to- look at just for a
minute. If you only knew what a difference there
is between the look-out down here and above Bar.
There there's almost always something going by —
Mrs. Stormont's basket carriage, or Master Groshen's
pony, or the butcher's cart.'
'Ah, my dear, I'm afraid that long visit to
your uncle Trenchard has spoiled you for my
quiet home.'
' No, it hasn't, uncle,' answers the girl, with a
little gush of feeling in the midst of her petulance,
just strong enough to show the better side of her
nature — 'no, it hasn't, for this is home and that
isn't. I should always feel that if I spent the
rest of my life with uncle Stephen. Of all the
old fidgets ! Well, I suppose I oughtn't to
say anything against him, for he has been very
kind to me in his way. He has given me a good
deal of money from first to last, though I must
say he doled it out stingily, as if he liked the
VOL. I. I
114 DEAD men's shoes.
money better than me ; and it is nice staying at hi s
house — one feels one's self somebody. Only think
of the Stormonts, and the Groshens, and the
Marlin Spykes calling on him before he had
been three weeks in Eedcastle, while you've lived
here thirty years and they've never called upon
you.'
' People at this end of the town are not visited,
my dear/ replies the doctor, mildly, as one who
bows to the mysterious ways of Providence and
questions not. 'I dare say the 4lite of Eedcastle
called upon your uncle out of kindness, he being
a stranger.'
' He being a millionaire, uncle, that's what you
mean. Very much they'd have called upon him
if he'd been a stranger who wanted to get his living.
Think of the Stormonts giving a dinner party on
purpose for him, and inviting me — after ignoring
me for the last four years — staring me in the face,
after church, for two hundred Sundays, and taking
no more interest in me than if I were a stone cherub
on a tablet in the minster, and now, all of a sudden,
beino- so fond of me. It's too ridiculous. If I was
DRIFTING INTO HAVEN. 115
as worldly as they are, I'd take a little more pains
not to show it.'
'The world is worldly, my love/ replies uncle
Eobert, with his resigned air. ' You can hardly
expect it to be otherwise. For my part, I am very
glad to think that the Stormonts have taken notice
of you, and that you've been invited out with
Mr. Trenchard. It may lead to your making a good
marriage, though you needn't set your mind upon
that now, as it is tolerably certain your uncle will
leave you an independence. I only wish Sibyl w^ere
at home to have her share of good fortune.'
' It's her own fault if she isn't,' says Marion.
* Say rather her conscientiousness, my dear. She
doesn't like to leave Mrs. Hazleton in a difficulty
about her children ; and very right too. But I hope
Mrs. Hazleton will suit herself with a new governess
very soon, and let Sibyl come home. Mr. Trenchard
has asked for her so often, and it really seems
flying in the face of Providence for her to be out
of the way.'
'If she wasn't a stupid, she wouldn't be at
Mrs. Hazleton's beck and call,' says Marion, and
116 DEAD men's shoes.
then exclaims, shrilly, ' Here's the omnibus, and lots
of people inside. Why, there's some one nodding
to us — a lady in a gray hat — and — I declare, the
'bus is stopping. Why, it's Sibyl.'
The blundering vehicle stops before Dr. Faun-
thorpe's gate ; a shabby carpet bag — only a carpet
bag — is handed down from the roof, and in the next
instant Sibyl is in the homely little garden, sobbing
hysterically on her uncle's shoulder.
He presses her to his breast tenderly, and looks
in the pale, wan face.
'Why, my darling, how ill you look — how
changed — how thin ! '
' I've had so much hard work, uncle,' she
answers, faintly, 'but, thank God, I am at home
at last.'
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EETUEN OF THE PEODIGAL.
' Home at last,' cries the wanderer, with glad thank-
fulness.
This is a night of rejoicing in Dr. Faunthorpe's
modest dwelling. The prodigal daughter has re-
turned, and the fatted calf, or at least so much of
him as a cutlet, fried as only Hester can fry a veal
cutlet, is served up in her honour. How cheery and
homely the common parlour, with its shabby old
furniture, dimly illuminated by two composite
candles which leave the paneled corners in densest
shadow, seems to those tired eyes !
* It is so nice to be at home again, uncle,' says
Sibyl lovingly, as she draws her chair a little nearer
the doctor's at supper-time. * What an old dear
Hester is ! and how deliciously she cooks ! '
' If you're so fond of home, I wonder you stayed
away so long,' remarks Marion, who cannot help
being occasionally disagreeable in her petty way.
118 DEAD men's shoes.
There was nothing large-minded about Marion, Sibyl
used to complain. She would never commit a big
sin, but would forfeit heaven by a multitude of
infinitesimal faults.
'Marion's faults are like the animalculse in a
glass of water,' remarked Sibyl on another occasion,
' too minute to be seen without a microscope, but
making the water unwholesome all the same.'
* I had to stop away to suit other people's con-
venience,' replies the prodigal, looking downward as
she squeezes lemon juice upon her cutlet.
' How altered you must be ! ' says that odious
Marion. ' Other people's convenience used to be
the last thing you thought about. When is your
luggage coming ? '
' My luggage ? I brought it with me.'
' I mean the rest of your luggage. The omnibus
man brought in nothing but a carpet bag.'
'That is my luggage,' answers Sibyl, colouring
to the roots of her hair. It is the first tinge of red
that has warmed her delicate cheek since her
arrival. 'I gave one of Mrs. Hazleton's servants
that horrid old heavy trunk of mine.'
THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL. 119
* But your dresses, your linen, you can't get them
all into that carpet bag/ cries Marion, almost in a
shriek. To be without variety of clothes is the last
calamity she can conceive among the miseries of
humanity.
* I have not one dress besides this. You can't
have any notion how one's dresses wear out in a
schoolroom — mischievous romping girls pulling one
about all day long, ink spilt in every direction,
candle-grease on all the tables, cups of tea per-
petually turned over. I was determined to buy
nothing during the last quarter, so I wore my old
dresses till they were almost in rags, and gave them
to my favourite housemaid when I came away.'
^ I dare say it was an excellent plan,' says
Marion, shrugging her thin shoulders, 'but you
won't be in a condition to make a very good
appearance in Redcastle till you've new things.
People will expect you to bring down the London
fashions too. They come out on the first of March,
don't they ? '
' ^Tiat a pity Fate made you a gentleman's
daughter Marion/ remarks Sibyl, with a cold sneer.
120 DEAD men's shoes.
' You would have made such a capital milliner.
Your soul would have been in your work.'
Dr. Faunthorpe sits back in his chair, reposeful,
after that little bit of hot supper, which is not an
every-day luxury. The small snappings and snarl-
ings of his nieces hardly discompose him, he is so
used to their sisterly talk. He is glad to have his
handsome niece at home again, seated close to his
chair, with all those familiar winning ways which
have won her the first place in his heart; small
gushings of loving speech, tender little smiles, gentle
touches of a white fluttering hand — graces of
manner which may mean very little, but are very
sweet ; petty Circean arts which have beguiled
honest men to ruin and death before to-day.
' My darling,' he says presently, as the dark
brown eyes smile upon him, brightening in the
candlelight, 'I am so glad you have come back. It
wasn't wise to stay away so long at the risk of
vexing your uncle Trenchard : but I'll say no more
about that. You are here, and all is well. You
must go and see him to-morrow.'
' How can she,' exclaims Marion, * in that
THE EETUEX OF THE PEODIGAX. 121
gown ? ' pointing contemptuously to Sibyl's shabby
alpaca, an alpaca which has seen much service,
cockled by the rain, and frayed at the edges of the
cuffs, and with that shrunken and dwindled ap-
pearance that ill-used garments are apt to assume.
'Pshaw, what does her gown matter? You can
lend her a gown. You have gowns enough and to
spare.'
* Xone that will fit Sibyl,' replies Marion, who
prides herself on her superior height. 'She's
welcome to wear one, but it '11 be two inches on the
ground.'
' Can't she run a tuck, or cut a bit off ? ' argues
uncle Eobert.
* I shall have to give you a tonic, my love,' he
adds, contemplating his elder niece anxiously, ' you
are looking so fagged and worn.'
* I am at home with you, uncle Eobert ; that is
the best tonic for me,' replies the girl fondly.
She is fond of him to-night. This shabby old
home, which she abandoned in sheer discontent two
years ago, seems very dear to her just now. It is
a h aven for a storm-beaten soul.
122 DEAD men's shoes.
' You will have a better home than this, my pet,
I hope, for the greater part of your time,' answers
the doctor, cheerily. ' I've no doubt your uncle
Trenchard will ask you to stay with him as he did
Marion. She was quite three months at Lancaster
Lodge, and is to go back again by and by. I look
upon her as little more than a visitor here ; but she
is kind enough to make the best of her old uncle
Eobert's humdrum house.'
'It is a great relief to be here for a change,
uncle,' answers Marion. ' I felt a fine lady at uncle
Trenchard's, but I feel my own mistress here. If it
wasn't for that tyrannical old Hester your house
would be liberty hall ; and I can forgive even Hester
when she is in a good humour and makes hot cakes
for breakfast.'
An hour later and uncle Robert has smoked
his after-supper pipe, and the girls are in their
bedroom, the old room which Sibyl knows so well,
with its ridiculous flowered paper, low ceiling, and
high painted dado, and curious brass safety bolts
upon the door, as if burglars were a contingency
to be provided against in that humble dwelling.
THE EETURX OF THE PRODIGAL. 123
How well she remembers the long narrow chimney-
piece, the basket-shaped grate with its wide hobs,
the open-work brass fender, the painted four-post
bedstead, drab and green, with skim^py dimity
valance, and two starveling curtains. The rickety
deal dressing-table, the streaky looking-glass, which
used to reflect ?. fair gii-l's face wondering at its own
beauty. The tall mahogany wardrobe that never
was opened without threatening to topple over and
wreak destruction on its violator. The scanty strips
of bedside carpet, dull in colour and perplexing in
pattern. How often she has pored and puzzled over
those interwoven scrolls, in sheer idleness of
thoucrht. All tinners are unchancred. There are the
D O O
wretched old ornaments on the mantelpiece. The
pasteboard spill-boxes, adorned with faded gold
paper, ancient works of art by fingers that have long
been dust. Tlie little black AVedLiwood vases,
urn-shaped, funereal. The hand screens with
lithographs of Dr. Syntax pasted thereupon,
and more paper gilding. Tlie two black profile
miniatures of dead and forgotten relatives.
It seems a dear old room somehow to Sibyl to-
124 DEAD men's shoes.
night, for it brings back the feelings of her innocent
girlish days, when life, if it had few pleasures, had
no cares. Now life means perplexity. Existence is
an entanglement from which only some happy turn
of fortune can extricate her.
She sits in her old place on the window-seat, and
loosens the long twisted roll of rich brown hair,
which falls over her bare shoulders like shining
drapery.
' Goodness ! ' cries Marion, ' how skinny your
shoulders have grown ! '
' Have they ? ' says Sibyl, coolly, glancing down-
wards at a white neck and arms in which the bones
are too sharply defined for beauty. ' Then we shall
look more like sisters when we wear low dresses.
Your shoulders were always skinny.'
Marion is silenced for the moment, and proceeds
with the destruction of that elaborate edifice of hair
and hair-pads which she constructs with infinite
pains every morning, even though no one outside
her own small family circle is likely to be gratified
by the sight thereof. Marion's hair has been
washed and doctored to the fashionable pre-
THE EETURN OF THE PEODIGAL. 125
Eaphaelite colour. It is thick and fluffy, and short,
only just covering the points of her bony shoulders,
and standing out round her head like an exaggerated
nimbus. It is not bad hair altogether, and Marion
thinks it one of her strong points, like her pre-
Eaphaelite figure, her long narrow foot, eighteen-
inch waist, arched eyebrows, white teeth, and other
small graces, some of which are the praiseworthy
result of patient training.
'Do let me see your pretty things, Sibyl,' the
younger sister exclaims presently, twisting one of
her yellow tresses in and out of a hair-pin.
The elder looks up, startled out of a profound
reverie.
' What pretty things ? '
'Well, you must have something to show me
— presents — things you have bought out of your
salary. I'm sure I should have a lot to show out of
forty pounds a year for two years. Glove-boxes,
sealskin purses, card-cases, neck-ties, lace, gloves,
and so on. I dare say that carpet bag is bursting
with them.'
' It is doing nothing of the kind. I found that
126 DEAD men's shoes.
it was as lauch as I could do to dress myself
decently for Mrs. Hazleton's parties and pay my
laundress. Evening dresses are so unprofitable.'
' They must be, if you have nothing to show out
of eighty pounds. I never thought you could bring
yourself to wear such a dress as that alpaca thing,'
adds Marion, pointing contemptuously to Sibyl's
shabby gown hanging on a peg upon the door. ' I
expected to see you come home quite a woman of
fashion.'
* People who teach unruly children, and have to
take them out walking in all weathers, have not
much chance of being fashionably dressed,' answers
Sibyl, wearily. ' Perhaps if you could contrive to
put dress out of your mind for five minutes or so,
Marion, we might have a little rational conversation.'
' Oh, very well ; of course I know what an in-
ferior mind mine is. You used to tell me so often
enough. But you were once rather fond of talking
about dress, and I thought, perhaps, if you've
nothing to show me you might like to see my
dresses — not home-made. Miss Eylett has made
every one, and a pretty price she lias charged me.'
THE EETUEN OF THE PRODIGAL. 127
Marion wrenches open the refractory door of the
wardrobe, and displays three calico-shrouded gar-
ments, hanging in a row, like sheeted ghosts. One
by one she brings forth these treasures, whisking off
their covering, and displaying each to Sibyl with a
dexterous twirl of her arm. A bronze brown silk ;
a pale gray, with elaborate ruchings of satin; a
black silk, which stands on end for very richness of
fabric.
' There,' she exclaims, swelling with pride, ' I
wore the gray — new — at Colonel Stormont's.'
' At Colonel Stormont's I Is the world coming
to an end, or what convulsion of nature brought
you and the Stormonts together ? "
' I was asked to dinner with uncle Trenchard.'
'And uncle Trenchard gave you the money to
buy those dresses, of course.'
*Yes. He said, 'Well, my dear, I suppose you'll
want a new gown ; ' and then 'he gave a heavy sigh,
and took a bank note out of an old-fashioned red
pocket-book, and then he looked at the note so long
that I was afraid he was going to change his mind,
and then he gave another sigh, deeper than the first,
128 DEAD men's shoes.
and handed me the note — a ten- pound note. I
tried to kiss him the first time, but he didn't seem
to like that, for he gave me a little peevish push,
and said ' There, my dear, that '11 do. "
* Funny old man ! How many ten-pound notes
has he given you ? '
' Four altogether. He always sighs just in the
same way, as if every note was a wrench. He's
inordinately rich, of course, but it seems to hurt
him so to part with his money that I can't help
thinking of that dreadful story of Douglas Jerrold's,
" The Man made of Money," and fancying that
uncle Trenchard is unrolling a bit of himself when
he gives away a bank note.'
' It's only such people who get inordinately rich,'
replies Sibyl, plaiting her long thick hair into one
massive tail for the night. ' And how did you get
on with uncle Trenchard, upon the whole ? '
' Oh, very well indeed. It was so nice driving
about in his new barouche, with a lovely pair of
chestnuts, and feeling one's self looked up to by all
Eedcastls ; and I had a splendid bedroom and
dressing-room, and we dined at half-past seven
THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL. 129
every day, with two men waiting upon us. I used
to feel afraid of them just at first, especially the
butler, who looks the image of ]\Ir. Groshen the
banker, and that took away from the grandeur ; but
I soon got accustomed to them, and learned to speak
to them in an offhand way, just like Mrs. Stormont.'
* Marion,' says Sibyl, earnestly, ' do you think
uncle Trenchard intends to leave us his money ? '
' Well, I should think he must leave it to us or to
hospitals ; and if we can manage to please him '
'We must please him, Marion, and wind our-
selves into his withered old heart somehow. It
would be ridiculous, abominable, shameful, for the
money to be left to hospitals when we want it so
badly- It's no use to enjoy the luxuries of his
house, to take a ten-pound note from him now and
then. That kind of thing will only make poverty
seem worse to us afterwards. We must have his
fortune.'
Her eyes dilate and brighten, her lips tremble
faintly as she leaves off speaking, and then her face
changes in a moment, and tears run down her wan
cheeks.
VOL. I. K
130 DEAD men's shoes.
* Gracious, Sibyl ! ' cries Marion, rushing at her
with a bottle of eau de Cologne and a towel, and
dabbing her forehead with the perfume. ' I declare
you're quite hysterical. Of course we must have
his money — if we can get it. What has the
fidgety old thing come home to England for except
to make our acquaintance and leave us his fortune ?
He has as good as said so ever so many times.'
Marion's sisterly attentions check that hysterical
attack of Sibyl's, and the two girls lie down side by
side affectionately, after a brief formula in the way
of evening prayer.
Deep in the chill spring night Sibyl's head tosses
restlessly on the pillow, and the sleeper's lips
murmur sorrowfully in troubled dreams, —
* Alex, Alex — don't be so cruel, Alex. Forgive
— you know — your sake — yes, yes — as much as
for my own.'
So pleads the sinner's vexed soul ; self-excusing,
self-accusing, even in dreams.
CHAPTEE IX.
UNCLE TRENCHARD.
Stephen Trenchaed paces his smooth gravel
walk in the April sunshine, after tiffin, looking
at the sparrows, and blackbirds, and thrushes
disporting blithely on his velvet lawn, or hopping
away into the shadow of evergreens — great masses
of laurel and laurustinus, rhododendron and bay,
which surround the smooth expanse of grass in a
semicircular sweep.
Very perfect is the order of Mr. Trenchard's
garden — not a yellow leaf on the laurels, not a
daisy peeping pertly, silver-white, from the lawn,
not a branch that grows awry. In the kitchen-
garden yonder, far away behind the shrubbery, the
fan-shaped fruit-trees look Like geometrical patterns
on the yellow brick waUs. The apples and pears
are all wired into exactest growth, and not a twig is
allowed its own way. Mr. Trenchard is in his
132 DEAD men's shoes.
garden by six o'clock every morning, and his severe
eye interrogates the smallest sprig of groundsel, and
rebukes the very slugs that vie with him in* early
rising. Mr. Trenchard is not a master to be trifled
with, and his gardeners know it. For every shilling
he expends he will have twelve pennyworth of
labour — nay, thirteen or fourteen pennyworth if he
can get it, Woe be to the wTetch who tries to put
him off with elevenpence halfpenny worth of
industry !
' I've had to work for my money,' says Mr.
Trenchard, 'and I expect value for my money
from other people.'
5e walks briskly up and down, looking to the
right and left with an eye bright and quick as a
bird's, a small black eye, which looks the blacker
for its whitened lashes. He is of middle height,
very thin, very yellow. He has sharply cut fea-
tures ; nose thin, pointed, and aggressive-looking;
lips also thin, and of a disagreeable pallid hue ;
eyebrows iron-gray, thick and bushy ; brow narrow ;
perceptive ridge strongly marked, upper head
receding ; hair thick, short, and iron-gray, like the
UNCLE TRENCHARD. 133
eyebrows, brushed into two sharp points, like a
terrier's ears.
Mr. Trenchard wears nankeen waistcoat and
trousers, very loose for his lean limbs, and a glossy
black frock coat, also loose, a black satin scarf with
a gold pin, and high shirt collars ; a double gold eye-
glass dangles on his breast, a glass which he wears
for show rather than use, but which intensifies
the severity of his countenance when he reproves
his gardeners, or lectures his butler.
He is a man who has toiled early and late, until
the other day, when he took it into his head to give
up his counting-house to a junior partner, and come
back to England and enjoy the evening of his life at
his ease. He has been a man of one idea all his
days, and the single object of his existence has been
the accumulation of money. The process of money-
making, the honour and homage which the world
renders the reputed millionaire — these have been so
sweet to him that the question of what he is to do
with his wealth has rarely presented itself seriously
to his mind.
On his sixty-ninth birthday he awoke suddenly
134 DEAD men's shoes.
to the consciousness that whatever personal enjoy-
ment he meant to have out of his wealth must be
obtained within the next ten, twelve, or fifteen years.
Even with his vigorous constitution he could hardly
hope to live beyond the age of eighty-five. Forty
years in India must take something out of a man,
be he never so temperate, and abstemiousness has
been one of Stephen Trenchard's virtues.
So at sixty-nine he said to himself, ' It is time
for me to go back to England ; let the world see
what a position I have made for myself, and take all
the good I can out of life.'
His seventieth birthday has not yet arrived, and
he has built for his soul a lordly treasure-house, or
in other words^ he has taken upon lease, decorated,
and furnished Lancaster Lodge, one of the best
houses in his father's native town of Eedcastle : he
has hired servants, purchased carriages and horses,
and begun a plain-sailing English gentleman's life
on a very liberal scale. The result so far has been
eminently satisfactory His house to him a kingdom
is, he rules his servants, indoor and outdoor, with a
rod of iron, and feels himself a potentate.
UNCLE TRENCH AKD. 135
Very pleasant to him is tlie incense which
Eedcastle offers to his wealth. People whose
fathers and grandfathers snubbed or ignored his
father, the struggling solicitor, bow down and
worship the Anglo-Indian Plutocrat. He accepts
their adoration with supreme coolness, and a quiet
arrogance which his admirers extol as innate
aristocracy of mind.
It has pleased him to permit his niece Marion
Faunthorpe to bask in the sunshine of his favour.
She is not handsome enough to charm his eye,
which is critical in the matter of feminine beauty,
nor is she clever enough to amuse him ; but she is
rather a pretty thing to have about his house, and
she does very well for a listener when he is in the
humour to teU his prosy old stories of dead and
gone Calcutta scandals. She knows how to hold
her tongue when he is inclined to be silent, is
solicitous for his small comforts, quiet as a mouse
when he takes his after-dinner nap. She behaves
gracefully at table, neither eats nor drinks too
much, looks stylish when fashionably dressed, moves
about the house quietly, and is not altogether
136 DEAD men's shoes.
deficient in tact. He is content, therefore, to
tolerate her as a frequent guest, but does not
appreciate her warmly enough to ask her to take
up her permanent abode with him.
He has made many inquiries about Sibyl, and
has been vexed by her non-appearance. The
Stormonts, the Groshens, and other notabilities have
praised the absent girl's beauty, having found out
all at once that a young person whose existence
they never troubled themselves to acknowledge was
the loveliest girl in Eedcastle. ' Quite the belle
of the place, I assure you, Mr. Trenchard,' says
Mrs. Stormont.
* Indeed,' remarks Stephen Trenchard. ' She
was invited out very much, I suppose ? '
*Well, no, dear Mr. Trenchard, she was too
young, you know — almost a child. And then your
brother-in-law is so retiring. We could never have
got him out of his shell.'
If there is one thing in that region of trifles
outside the money market which Mr. Trenchard
appreciates it is beauty in woman. Having heard
his eldest niece so enthusiastically praised, he is
UNCLE TRENCHAKD. 137
particularly anxious to see her, ever so much the
more anxious because her indifference has thwarted
him/
* She must be a queer kind of girl/ he tells him-
self, 'to hang back from a rich uncle, to prefer
drudging as a governess to sponging upon me.
Marion is glad enough to take all she can get,
and would kneel down and kiss my shoe-string if
I asked her. Her feelings are transparent enough.
This other one must be something out of the
common.'
A wonderful advantage this for Sibyl at start-
ing ; though it is an advantage she has gained
accidentally.
The great lodge bell clangs out, while Mr.
Trenchard paces up and down, and startles the
respectable tranquilKty of Above Bar with its
clamour. He takes out his watch. Too early for
a ceremonious visit. Mr. Trenchard walks round
by the side windows of his large square mansion,
and comes within view of the gate. Two ladies
enter, both young and slim, both tall, but one
rather shorter than the other. The taller gives a
138 DEAD men's shoes.
little eager cry and runs forward to him, the second
advances more slowly.
*Dear uncle Stephen,' cries Marion, pursing up
her lips to be kissed, an operation which uncle
Stephen performs with a slightly reluctant air,
' Sibyl has come home quite unexpectedly,' Marion
is always out of breath at the beginning of a visit,
a pretty gushing way which some people call
charming, *and I thought I might bring her — to
— see you — dear uncle John.'
' Thought you might bring her. Of course you
might bring her. Haven't I been asking to see her
ever since Christmas? So that is Sibyl, is it?'
looking at the graceful figure lingering on the sun-
lit grass a few yards away from him. The bright
face is flushed with palest rose, the dark full
eyes are looking slily at him, the dark brown hair
is burnished by the sun. A fair picture of peer-
less youth for crabbed age to admire.
' So that is Sibyl ! Yes, she is very lovely.
Those sycophants haven't exaggerated. Come here,
my love, come to 3^our old uncle. Naughty child,
why did you stay away so long ? '
UXCLE TREXCHAED. 189
He holds out his lean old arms, he folds her
to his breast, he kisses her lovingly, paternally,
as he has never yet kissed Marion, despite her
affectionate blandishments.
*Well, I never!' Marion exclaims inwardly,
standing a little aloof, and feeling that her reign
is over.
CHAPTER X.
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD.
The favourable impression which Sibyl makes on
her uncle Stephen Trenchard is a fact too obvious
for diversity of opinion.
Marion reluctantly, sullenly even, admits that
truth, with many sneers and inuendos about win-
ning manners and hoUow-heartedness.
'I have never laid myself out to please uncle
Stephen as Sibyl lays herself out,' murmurs the
injured maiden. ' I can't flatter people with my
looks. I haven't Sibyl's caressing ways. I can't
pretend more affection than I feel ; and I must say
that uncle Stephen's dry little jerky ways of
speaking and looking at one are not calculated to
develop affection.'
Thus argues Marion in the easy atniosphere of
uncle Eobert's every-day parlour. The girls are
seated at supper with Dr. Faunthorpe, trifling with
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 141
morsels of bread and cheese, after having dined
with Mr. Trenchard.
' I did not find him hard or dry/ replies Sibyl.
* He seems really kind and affectionate, and I was
grateful to him for his warm welcome. I don't
know what you mean by my lapng myself out
to please him. I remembered that he was poor
mamma's only brother, and our own flesh and blood,
the uncle I had heard so much about years ago,
and I was naturally touched by our meeting.'
' Ah,' says Marion, ' what an advantage it is
for a woman to be able to cry when she likes !
How do you manage it. Sib ? '
' If the tears came into my eyes to-day it was
because I am not very strong just now, Marion/
answers Sibyl, reddening. ' You are really the most
horrid girl I ever met with.'
* However horrid I am, I am not double-faced,'
replies the other, promptly. * I should be ashamed
to court uncle Trenchard if I were you, when I
remember the things you've said about him.'
'What things?'
' What a convenient memory yours is ! Haven't
142 DEAD men's shoes.
you said that you despised him for his meanness
as a young man — that he won his way in the
world by double dealing, by base flattery of his
patron — that all your sympathy was with the young
man he supplanted, Mr. Secretan ? '
At that name Sibyl flushes crimson, and then
grows ashy pale.
*Ah, I see you do remember,' cries Marion,
triumphantly.
' Marion,' exclaims the mild little surgeon, with
a rare flash of anger, ' I will not have your sister
teased in this manner. How dare you accuse her
of falsehood or hypocrisy ? She has as good a
right to Stephen Trenchard's favour as you have.'
*Yes, and to his fortune. Let her have it all,'
cries Marion, tempted to go into hysterics, but
thinking better of it immediately. 'She is to go
and stay with him, and keep house for him, directly
she can get her things ready, which, considering
she came home without a rag, must take some time.
She is to pay him a long visit. I'm nobody now.'
'My love, you have had your innings,' pleads
the pacific doctor.
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 143
' Oh, of course, and just as I have got to un-
derstand his ways and know how to please him
I am pushed aside.'
' My dear, his sense of justice will induce him
to distribute his bounty fairly.'
' His sense of justice did not prevent his kissing
Sibyl more affectionately than he has ever kissed
me.'
'Mere fancy on your part, I have no doubt/
says the doctor.
After this little burst of temper Marion calms
down and is tolerably placable. She even discusses
her sister's outfit with some show of interest. Mr.
Trenchard has given Sibyl five-and-twenty pounds.
* I suppose you are pretty well provided with cash,
little one,' he said, just before she wished him
good-night, 'an independent-minded young woman
like you who goes out into the world to get her
own living is sure to have a well-lined purse.'
Sibyl blushed, and owned that her purse had
no lining at aU.
* Ah, I see, sent help home to the old doctor,'
muttered Mr. Trenchard, fortunately not loud enough
144 DEAD men's shoes.
for Marion to hear, or that sharp-tongued young
person would inevitably have set him right. ' Well,
well, very right, very proper.'
And then the crimson pocket-book was slowly
brought forth, and Mr. Trenchard sighed a despond-
ing sigh as he opened it, a sigh that was like a
funeral gun for his departed bank notes. Sibyl
went back to the dingy old house at the bottom
of the town richer by five-and-twenty pounds than
when she left it at mid-day.
The girls go out gaily enough next morning
to Carmichael's, the haberdashery, linendrapery, and
silk mercery establishment of Eedcastle, to supply
the void in Sibyl's wardrobe. Five-and-twenty
pounds is not much for a young lady of large ideas,
but Sibyl, schooled in the philosophy of small
means, makes the most of that sum. She spends
all her money at Carmichael's, and trusts to Provi-
dence and Stephen Trenchard for means to pay
Miss Eylett for the making up of her dresses, and
Mr. Korksoll, the bootmaker, for the equipment
of her pretty little feet. It is astonishing how far
away from the thoughts of Miss Eylett and Mr.
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 145
Korksoll seems the notion of payment now that
Miss Faunthorpe's rich uncle has returned from the
Indies. 'You are to send the things home to me
at Lancaster Lodge,' says Sibyl, and that seems as
good as paying for them.
Sibyl has asked for a week in which to prepare
herself for this important visit, and that week is
occupied in the stitching, hemming, sewing, felling,
gathering, and trimming of underclothing — the
fashion of ready-made linen not having yet vitiated
the housewifely habits of Eedcastle. The lower mid-
dle classes make their own garments, laboriously,
and are proud of their toil ; the upper classes em-
ploy school children, reduced widows, or virtuous
orphans for the labour, and contrive thereby to
exercise a good deal of patronage at a very small
expenditure.
Sibyl revives considerably during this week of
preparation. She manages to rest a good deal,
other people taking the chief burden of getting her
clothes made on their shoulders. She lies on the
sofa in the shabby old parlour, staring idly at
the white and yellow spring flowers that brighten
VOL. 1. L
146 DEAD men's shoes..
the dull brown beds yonder in the familiar garden,
the white pear blossoms tossing gaily in the light
April wind, the jonquils peeping over the tall box
border, the sword-shaped lily of the valley leaves
cleaving the damp mould in the shadow of the
bulging moss-grown wall, summer's harbinger in the
shape of a butterfly skimming over the tender rose
leaves. A dull old house verily — a limited prospect,
this long strip of walled garden, yet sweet and
soothing to one who has suffered. Sweet to lie at
rest on the slumberous sofa, with no thought or care
for the day, and with but vaguest thought of the
morrow.
'If uncle Trenchard leaves me a fortune life
will be made so easy,' Sibyl muses, her arms
folded above her head, her eyes fixed dreamily on
the waving white pear-bloom, * I shall have but
to call Alex back to me, and we can be happy
together again, and taste the sweets of life again,
as we did in our brief bright honeymoon. Poverty
and love cannot live long together; but love with
plenty of money — that means paradise.'
The future, dimly veiled though it is, seems
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 147
very easy to her just now. She is elated by her
uncle's evident admiration of her. She has made
just the impression that she would have wished to
make upon that fate-disposing relative. To follow
up that impression will be simple enough. Has she
not been told of her winning ways, of those small
fascinations which make a woman powerful for
good or evil ? Has she not been always her uncle
Robert's favourite, everybody's favourite, without
effort on her own part? while Marion, painfully
anxious to please, has been looked on rather as a
nuisance, a vivacious nonenity of whom one might
easily have too much.
Mr. Trenchard's carriage calls every afternoon,
with its coachman and footman in respectable
Puritan drab liveries, to take the two young ladies
for an airing ; Mr. Trenchard himself rarely making
any use of the equipage, which he keeps rather
as an appanage of his state than for pleasure or
convenience. It is very agreeable to Sibyl to drive
up the long street, with its ascending scale of social
importance, from the shabby old houses at uncle
Robert's end of the town to the stately stone man-
148 DEAD men's shoes.
sions above Bar. Very agreeable to pass the 4lite
whom Marion has just begun to know, and salutes
with delighted becks and bows, but whom Sibyl
surveys with a stony stare, affecting to have not the
faintest notion who they are,
' That Faunthorpe girl is handsomer than ever,'
says Colonel Stormont to his wife, whom he is
driving in a pony carriage a size or two larger than
a washing basket. 'She's pretty sure to come in
for a tidy share of the old fellow's money, I should
think. Not a bad match for Frederick.'
Frederick is the hope of the Stormonts — great
at cricket, croquet, and athletics, fire brigade and
volunteer rifle corps ; a youth with very thin legs,
and not much body, who wears a cutaway coat
that just clears his hips, and has never been seen
in an overcoat, or without a flower in his button-
hole.
'No family,' says Mrs. Stormont, pursing up
her lips.
' Family be bothered ! ' remarks the colonel. ' Old
Trenchard is rolling in money. What's the good of
family ? It won't keep a roof over your head, or pay
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 149
the tax-gatherer. Commerce is the thing now-a-
days. If Fred doesn't marry a rich woman pretty
soon he'll have to go into commerce. You ought
to take notice of those Faunthorpe girls.'
' I'll caU next week,' replies Mrs. Stormont,
obediently.
Sibyl's beauty is the talk of the town. Ked-
castle is suddenly awakened to the consciousness
of loveliness that scarcely moved it to admiration
two years ago, although the girl's beauty had then
the bloom and freshness of unchastened youth.
Perhaps she is really lovelier now. Sorrow and
passion have passed there, and left the exalted
look of an awakened soul, where there was before
only girlish innocence, curious and wondering
about a world of which it knew nothing. She has
eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The mystery of life has been revealed to her. Be
sure that Eve's beauty had a deeper meaning
after she came out by the fatal gate where the
angel with the flaming sword kept watch and
ward.
The cdLTvia^Q comes at the week's end to fetch
150 DEAD men's shoes.
Miss Faunthorpe and her belongings, to the tribu-
lation of her young sister Jenny, who has had so
much of Marion lately that she is deeply grieved
to lose Sibyl.
' It will be ever so much worse for me when
you're gone,' she says. 'You do stand up for a
fellow sometimes. She'll be sending me upstairs
for her handkerchief or her keys three times an
hour, and making me crimp her hair till my
fingers ache, and unpick her old dresses. I wish
uncle Trenchard would let me go with you. I
shouldn't cost much or be in his way. And
now uncle Eobert says I'm not to go to school
any more, because it makes me vulgar, and Marion
is to go on with my education. A nice educa-
tion it will be ! I don't believe she knows when
William the Conqueror came over, or who invented
potatoes.'
Sibyl tears herself from the lamenting damsel,
kisses uncle Eobert with a plaintive little look
more expressive of gratitude than many a lengthy
oration, and takes her place in the barouche, which
becomes her as a frame does a picture, and seems
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD. 151
as much her attribute as Juno's car to the
goddess.
'Good-bye, Poverty/ she says to herself as the
chestnuts throw up their fore-legs as if they were
playing cup and ball, and dash off towards the
Bar. * It shall go hard with me if my name is
not written in uncle Trenchard's will before long.'
CHAPTEE XL
HOW STEPHEN TRENCHAKD FORGIVES.
The new life at Lancaster Lodge suits Sibyl as
if she had been created for no other purpose than
to sit at her uncle's table, pour out his coffee,
air his newspapers, play or sing to him in the
evenings, and take her own pleasure for the rest
of the day. Housekeeping is an easy burden in
so well-ordered an establishment. The trained
servants perform their duties, light for the most
part, with mechanical precision. The service is too
good to be forfeited by scamped work, or forget-
fulness of the master's wishes. Stephen Tren chard
has let his servants understand that he will have
fullest value for his money, that there must
be no talents stowed away in napkins in his
household. He has contrived to inspire them with
wholesome fear, and is served to the utmost of
their power.
HOW STEPHEN TREXCHARD FORGIVES. 153
Sibyl is not afflicted with a genius for domestic
matters. She remembers with a shudder those
days in Dixon Street when she had to cater for
a penniless husband, and make ninepence do the
work of a shilling. She remembers this weary
time, and reposes in her low easy chair, novel in
hand, the garden smiling at her through the open
French window, horses and carriages at her dis-
posal, luxury around her, all Eedcastle subjugated
and more or less prostrated at her feet, — she
keenly remembers the past, and deems her present
life worthy some sacrifice, more especially as the
present is made still brighter by vague hopes of
happiness, and a reconciliation of all life's perplexi-
ties in the future. ^
She has her dark moments, naturally, "^'hat
life is without shadow ? There are moments when
she thinks of one she has fondly loved — fondly
loves still, perhaps, in some sealed chamber of
her heart. There are hours in which she wonders,
with remorseful wonder, how he fares whom she
so ruthlessly abandoned.
Tor his future advantage,' she tells herself; 'as
154 DEAD men's shoes.
Mrs. Secretan I should have forfeited my uncle's
fortune — as Miss .Faunthorpe I may win it and
share it with my husband.'
Established as Stephen Trenchard's favourite
niece, Sibyl finds herself an object of unbounded
interest and admiration with the elite. Mrs.
Stormont, although overflowing with kindness, at
first shows some disposition to patronize, but finding
this eldest Miss Faunthorpe a young woman not
amenable to patronage, changes her note and accepts
Mr. Trenchard's niece as *one of ourselves,' elected
and chosen to sit in the high places of Eedcastle.
'The girl has a wonderful air,' argues Mrs.
Stormont, 'when you consider that she is totally
without family.'
* Talking of family,' muses the colonel, ' I hope
it's all right about old Trenchard's money, and that
he hasn't left any niggers over in Calcutta to
whom he may leave his fortune.'
*My dear Eeginald, I'm surprised at you,'
exclaims the lady, with a look of horror. 'Mr.
Trenchard goes to church every Sunday, and is
altogether a most correct person.'
HO^V STEPHEN TEENCHARD FORGIVES. 155
*We don't know what he may have been in
India, though,' says the colonel. ' He may have
been a devil-worshipper, and danced an exaggerated
highland fling at devil-dances ; or a Mahometan,
or a Brahmin, or a Thug. He seems to have plenty
of money, and that's about all we know of
him.'
Notwithstanding which ignorance as to Stephen
Trenchard's antecedents the colonel and his wife
continue to court and cherish him, arranging the
nicest little dinners for him, with Mr. Groshen to
sit opposite to him and discourse upon the money
market; lavishing affection on Sibyl, inquiring
kindly about the exiled Marion — as remote at the
UDvisited end of the town as if she had been
removed to another hemisphere — and making them-
selves generally subservient and agreeable. Fred-
erick Stormont, with his cutaway coat and legs like
sticks of sealing wax, calls frequently at Lancaster
Lodge, and is 'deeply interested in everything that
interests Sibyl, — the flower-garden, the horses; he
even volunteers to be interested in the poultry, but
bottles his enthusiasm upon finding that Miss
156 DEAD men's shoes.
raunthorpe has no taste for Dorkings, Spaniards, or
Cochin-Chinas.
There is a billiard-room at Lancaster Lodge, and
Frederick is great at billiards. He drops in of an
evening, and plays with Mr. Trenchard ; he teaches
Sibyl how to handle her cue, and discourses wisely
on the theory of angles.
' Well, pretty one,* says Mr. Trenchard one night,
when Fred has taken his departure with obvious
reluctance, and uncle and niece are loitering by the
billiard- table, Sibyl leaning over the green cloth to
aim at the distant red, dressed in pale gray silk,
with innumerable flounces, and knots of mauve
ribbon dotted about among them, a masterpiece of
Miss Eylett's art. ' Well, my pet, I think it's pretty
clear what that young gentleman comes here for.'
* Billiards, I should think,' replies Sibyl, pushing
her cue gently backwards and forwards as she
meditates her aim. ' They have no table at the
Stormonts, and it is cheaper for him to play here
than at the " Coach and Horses." '
'The billiard-table is a very good excuse, my
dear, but the gentleman comes to see you.'
HOW STEPHEN TREXCHARD FORGIVES. 157
'Poor thread-paper!' exclaims Sibyl, with a con-
temptuous laugh. ' For his own sake — if the thing
can feel — I hope not.'
'Why, he'd be a very good match for you,
wouldn't he ? ' asks her uncle, looking keenly at
her from under his penthouse brows. 'These
Stormonts are great people, the leaders of Eedcastle
society. You could hardly do better than marry
into their set.'
' If I were likely ever to marry, which I'm not,'
says Sibyl, pocketing her ball triumphantly off the
red, 'I'd marry a man!
' Xever likely to marry ! what do you mean by
that ? '
* Simply that I'm quite happy as I am, and that
I mean to stop with you, and take care of you,
please uncle Stephen, until you get tired of me.'
She has been living with her rich uncle nearly
three months, and there is no more talk of her
being a visitor at Lancaster Lodge. It is her home.
Marion may come and go, but Sibyl remains.
Stephen Trenchard cannot do without her.
*I shan't get tired of you in a hurry,' answers
158 DEAD men's shoes.
Mr. Trenchard, ' but I think for your own sake you
ought to marry when you get a good opportunity.
I was only joking about that whipper-snapper, who
walks about the place as if the very paving stones
were his property, and couldn't give you change for
a five-pound note if you asked him for it. He's
not the man for you. But with your pretty face
you are sure to find the right kind of man before
long, a man with brains and money, and when you
do I hope you'll be wise enough to marry him.
It's all very well while I'm here to take care of
you, but when I'm dead and gone "
* When you are dead and gone I shall have your
money, you dear old thing,' thinks Sibyl, but says
not a v/ord. Slie only goes to her uncle's side, and
lays her face upon his shoulder, and gives him
one of those gentle little caresses which Marion
would as soon have offered to the Zoological
Garden's tiger as to her Anglo-Indian uncle.
* Yes, pretty one, I should like to see you well
married before my time comes,' says Stephen
Trenchard.
'Now you know, uncle, that you are under a
HOW STEPHEN TRENCHARD FORGIVES. 159
solemn agreement with me to live till you are
ninety,' replies Sibyl, shaking her finger at him
with playful menace.
She has grown very intimate with her nncle
in these three months, her playing, her singing,
her bright talk, her sparkling, vivacious little ways
have won the old man's confidence. Stern to all
the rest of the world, implacable in all his deal-
ing with men, suspicious alike of equals and
inferiors, tyrannical to his servants, he is yet won-
drously gentle to Sibyl. His inherent meanness,
his mental incapacity to give, cannot be wholly
subjugated even by her influence, but what money
he bestows upon her he gives less grudgingly than
to Marion. He feels the loss of so many pounds
a shade less keenly when Sibyl's pleasure is in
question, and though he grumbles sorely at the
costliness of a woman's toilet he is pleased to see
his niece expensively dressed, and may in time
come to regard her costume as one of the acces-
sories of his own grandeur, like his stables or hot-
houses.
Earely, despite the confidence that is established
160 DEAD men's shoes.
between tliem, has Mr. Tren chard talked to Sibyl
of his past life, of his youth never. He tells her
his prosy old stories of Calcutta society, of men
with whom he has had commercial dealings, of
clever frauds and chicaneries which he chuckles
over as the coups cVetat of the trading world, but
of himself he speaks very little. Never, above all,
has the fatal name of Secretan crossed his lips ;
and Sibyl is longing to find out the state of his
feelings now, after this lapse of time, in relation
to that name.
If he had learned, in the lapse of years, to
forgive the man he injured and over-reached, if
he had grown to feel some touch of remorseful
pity for the supplanted son, what a happiness it
would be to fall on her knees at his feet and
confess the secret of her life, to be pardoned for
her duplicity, set free from the toil and trouble of
falsehood, able to call her proud young husband
back to her side, and to begin life again, honest
in the sight of man and at peace with God!
She is continually musing upon this question,
and would give much for an opportunity of
HOW STEPHEN TKEXCHARD FOEGIYES. 161
soimding her uncle's feelings. It comes one day
unawares, and she has no longer need to speculate
or wonder about Stephen Trenchard's sentiments
upon the subject of an old enemy.
It is a drowsy July afternoon. The summer is
at its hottest, and Mr. Trenchard and his niece
are sitting on the lawn after that elaborate meal,
half breakfast, half luncheon, which the Anglo-
Indian caUs tiffin. The lawn behind Lancaster
Lodge is a delightful place on a warm summer
day. Three or four old elms, a spreading cedar, a
Spanish chestnut, and a couple of noble plane
trees afford abundant shade. The grass is smooth
as velvet. Garden chairs, low and luxurious, are
dotted about under the trees. Newspapers, and
Sibyl's work-basket, bestrew the light iron table.
Changing lights and shadows flit and flicker among
the leaves, and Stephen Trenchard's lean figure,
stretched to its full length, reposes at ease
on a bamboo reclining chair, a glass of potash
water on one side of him, a cigar-case on the
other.
Sibyl is reading to him out of yesterday's Times,
VOL. I. M
162 DEAD men's shoes.
when lie interrupts her with a sudden sigh,
which is almost a groan.
'^What is the matter, uncle Stephen ? '
' You had better leave off, — even your soft voice
irritates me.'
'Your nervous headache not gone yet, uncle
Stephen ? '
' Gone ! It's worse than ever. This English
summer is more oppressive than Indian heat, or
it seems so to me at any rate.'
Sibyl searches in the little work-basket lined
with blue satin, fishes out a silver-stoppered
scent-bottle, and is on her knees by her uncle's
side in a moment, dabbing his yellow fore-
head with her handkerchief steeped in eau de
Cologne.
'Thank you, my dear, that will do. I don't
care about it.'
He gives her an impatient little push, as dis-
approving so much fuss, but not before she has
disarranged one of those terrier-ear wisps of iron-
gray hair, and been startled by a scar which dis-
figures the forehead beneath it, a long narrow seam,
HOW STEPHEN TREXCHARD FORGR^ES. 163
which crosses the temple diagonally just below the
roots of the hair.
* Uncle Stephen, were you ever in battle ? *
* Battle, child ? What nonsense ! Of course
not/
' Or in a mutiny — or anything ? How did you
get this dreadful scar ? '
'From the foul blow of a scoundrel,' answers
Stephen Trenchard, deadly pale. 'From the man
who lamed me for life. Did you never hear youi-
mother speak of Philip Secretan ? '
* Yes, uncle Stephen, I have heard her say that
he treated you very badly.'
* Oh, she owned as much, did she ? The world
in general would have it that I used him badly
that I had no right to the money his father left
me — a paltry thirty thousand; that I ought to
have stood on one side and said, " No, blood is
thicker than water. You've been an idler and a
profligate — a bad son, the business would have
gone to wreck and ruin if it had been left to you
to save it. I've toiled, I've slaved, I've planned
and plotted, I've borne the heat and burden of
164 DEAD men's shoes.
the day; but still you are the son, and you've a
right to come in at the eleventh hour and rob
me of my just reward, simply because you are
the son," That's what the world would have had
me do, in the high and mighty justice it is so
good at dealing out for other people, and so bad
at yielding on its own account. Some went so far
as to say that the will was forged, and I was
the forger. Luckily for me, old Mr. Secretan had
published his intention of disinheriting his son,
and making me his heir, the year of the great
Manchester failures, when his house tottered, and
I had the luck to save it by a desperate stroke
of business.'
'He was very fond of you, I suppose, this old
Mr. Secretan ? ' asks Sibyl, breathlessly.
* Fond of me ? Yes, perhaps as much as it was
in his nature to be fond of anything, except
money. He hated his son, knowing that he was
a spendthrift, and would squander every shilling
the old man had toiled for. He trusted me — he
looked up to me. " If you were my son," he used
to say, " I shouldn't be tortured by the thought
HOW STEPHEX TREXCHARD FORGIVES. 165
that this business would go to ruin when I'm in
my grave." The day he said that for the first
time I made up my mind that I was to be his
heir. Philip's follies and vices helped me, but
my own patience and industry were the chief
agents.'
'And there was a quarrel between you and
Philip Secretan?' asks Sibyl, seated on the grass
and plucking up little tufts of it nervously, as
she watches her uncle's vindictive face with eager
eyes, reading doom there.
'Yes, when the will had been read, and he
knew the worst — he ought to have expected it if
he had a grain of sense, — Philip Secretan followed
me out into the grounds. His father's house was
a few miles outside Manchester, a fine old place
enough, but neglected, — the old man was too fond
of money to spend much on house or gardens.
Philip followed me to the back of the grounds,
where there was a wild bit of shrubbery and a
hollow that had once been a stone quarry, and
which had been left, either because people didn't
care about the expense of filling it, or because
166 DEAD men's shoes.
tliey fancied it was picturesque. In any case it
was dangerous, and an abomination that ought to
liave been done away with. Well, I was close to
the edge of this hollow — there being a short cut
to the Manchester road just beyond it — when
Philip overtook me. He didn't spare me, I can
tell you, for, apart from the money question, there
was an old sore between us. The girl he wanted
to marry had done me the honour to prefer his
father's confidential clerk. She was a sensible
girl, and saw the point to which our lives were
drifting. When he had called me reptile, and a
few other equally agreeable names, finding that he
couldn't sting me into retaliation by abuse of that
kind, he came close up to me and struck me across
the face with his open hand. " There, cur," he
cried, " and let's see if that will warm your fish's
blood into manly feeling." I had been in a burn-
ing rage all the time at his insolence,' but had held
myself in check, in pity for his disappointment,
which was hard to bear, no doubt, richly as he
had deserved it. I was a man, and the shame of
a blow was too much even for my sluggish. temper,
HOW STEPHEN TREXCHAHD FORGIVES. 167
trained to patience by long servitude. I closed
with him, and we wrestled together on that path
by the quarry. Now mark the cowardice of this
fine gentleman, who boasted of his honour, and
called me a sneak and reptile 1 He was twice
my match in weight and size, three times my
match in training, a practised athlete, a skilled
boxer, every muscle developed by exercise. To use
his force against mine was simply murder. I was
the shuttlecock, and he the battledore. I had a
confused sense of blows raining on my head, as
from a Nasmyth's hammer, coloured sparks dancing
before my eyes, fire shooting out of my brain,
and then I was hurled bodil}' into the air, and
fell crashinf; through the brushwood into the
quarry. It seemed like falling from the highest
cliff that breasts the Atlantic'
' How dreadful ! ' says Sibyl, with a gasp.
' It was deep in the night when I awoke,
and the stars were shining. I wondered where
I was, and how I came to see the pole-star
looking straight down at me. Pain came before
memory, acute, agonizing pain, and then I knew
.168 DEAD men's shoes.
that my leg liad been shattered somehow. I lay
in the quarry till past eight o'clock next morning,
suffering indescribable torture. At last, however,
some labourers heard my faint cries for help,
found me, and carried me to the nearest road-
side inn, whence I was conveyed to the Man-
chester Infirmary. Here I lay for five months —
ths most miserable months of my life — while the
fractured bones united. It was a compound frac-
ture, and for some time I was threatened with
amputation. When I rose from the hospital bed
I was lame for life. The broken leg had con-
tracted in the process of healing. Surgery had
done its best for me, and had saved my leg;
but surgery left me a cripple ; for which life-
long injury I had to thank Philip Secretan. I
had to thank him for somethinsj else too, for the
girl who had pretended to love me chose this
time for throwing me over, and making a better
match.'
'And in those weary months, lying on your
bed of pain, you learned to forgive your enemy,'
suggests Sibyl, very gently.
HOW STEPHEN TRENCHARD FORGIVES. 169
' Learned to forgive him ! Yes, if forgiveness
means undying hatred; if forgiveness means the
rankling memory of an unatonable wrong ; if
forgiveness means to remember him and curse
him every time a change of wind brings back
the old grinding pain in this crippled limb. If
that means forgiveness, Philip Secretan and his
race are forsjiven.'
* His race ? ' falters Sibyl. * You could feel no
rancour af^ainst his children.'
' I could. I do,' answers the old man, vindic-
tively. 'Let no viper of that blood cross my
path. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and
the children's teeth are set on edge." There's
Scripture for you. I believe in that good old
heathen creed one reads of in Greek legends, of
an accursed race. Of Philip Secretan's after career
I know little or nothing. He had the devil's
luck as well as his own, and married a woman
with money, soon after his father's death, but I
never heard what became of him. He may be
living or dead. If he lives, let him keep out of
my way. If he has left children, my dearest
170 DEAD men's shoes.
hope is that they are penniless, homeless, street
Arabs, whose playground is the gutter, whose
ultimate destiny is the gallows/
' Uncle, for mercy's sake '
' My curse light on him and his seed to the
third generation! There, child, don't cry. You
should have known better than to tempt me to
talk of Philip Secretan.'
CHAPTEE XII.
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF KICHER STORE.
After that summer day under the plane trees,
Sibyl utters the name of Secretan no more. Hope
of relenting on her uncle's part there is none. If
Alexis could forgive the man who in his version of
the story came basely between father and son to
cheat the son of his heritage, and tricked the lover
out of his mistress, Stephen Trenchard's stubborn
soul would still remain unsoftened. Eeconciliation
between these two was impossible. To retain
her uncle's favour, and inherit a portion of his
wealth, Sibyl must keep the secret of her marriage.
A painful part to play even for a mind not untrained
in deceit ; but a necessary part, Sibyl tells herself.
A difificult game, but for a stake well worth the
winning. She has no exact measure of her uncle's
possessions. He has never talked to her of his in-
vestments, or told her his income, but she has a
172 DEAD men's shoes.
fixed idea that his wealth is almost without limit,
that, like the Eothschilds or the Duke of West-
minster, he could scarcely state the sum-total of his
riches if he were asked for exact figures. His for-
tune is a rolling mass of gold, she supposes, which
grows larger at every turn, like a snowball. The
respect she sees paid to him by the elect of
Eedcastle establishes her in this conviction of
Stephen Trenchard's importance, for she knows that
in this case importance can only mean money.
Lancaster Lodge is one of those handsomely
finished, solidly built houses which adorn the out-
skirts of every country town, and are like temples
dedicated to the genius of commonplace ; houses in
which the butler's pantry has been as carefully con-
sidered as the drawing-room, and in which my lady's
boudoir is just as unlovely as John Thomas's attic
under the leads. All the principal rooms are large
and square and lofty. The passages are broad and
straight. The staircase is well proportioned, ven-
tilated and lighted to perfection. Impossible to
find fault with a house which, as the house agent
proudly puts it, possesses all the requirements for a
LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE. 173
gentleman's family. Equally impossible to feel the
slightest interest in a mansion which neither awes
by its splendour nor attracts by its eccentricity, nor
charms by the lowlier graces of homeliness and
simplicity. A coffin descending that mathematical
staircase would lose its awfulness in the pervading
atmosphere of commonplace. A cradle in any of
those rooms would seem to have lost its way, and
wandered into a desert, where baby-life could not
endure. Xo sadly sweet fancies of domestic joys
that are no more entwine themselves about this
dwelling of Stephen Trenchard's. It looks like
what it is — an old bachelor's house, — and Mr,
Trenchard could hardly have chosen a habitation
more completely in harmony with his own character.
The Eedcastle upholsterer, a man whose stock
in trade appears to consist of two easy chairs and a
sideboard — but who can do great things at a push, —
has furnished Lancaster Lodge with appropriate
splendour. All is solid and grandiose ; dark
crimson draperies — velvet in the dining-room and
library, satin brocade in the drawing-room — subdue
the garish light and give a sombre grandeur to the
174 DEAD men's shoes.
rooms. Heavy oak furniture, thickest Turkey and
Persian carpets ; varied spoil of carved black wood,
ivory, porcelain, and Bombay inlaid work, which
Mr. Trenchard has brought home with him from
India, — everywhere the evidence of wealth.
To Sibyl the house seems simply perfect. Its
luxury, its soft silent splendour, contrast so plea-
santly with the humble homeliness of her uncle
Robert's old-fashioned, low-ceiled rooms ; the
stealthy-footed footman, who spends so much of his
time looking at nothing particular out of the hall
window, that he grows sedentary in his habits, and
fancies he has disease of the heart ; the ponderous
butler in his glossy black suit and irreproachable
white tie ; the smart maid-servants, in crisp starched
cambric, tight-waisted, prim, supercilious, as if
Mr. Trenchard's importance as the richest man in
Redcastle shed reflected glory upon them. The
household has an air of quiet dignity which im-
presses Sibyl wonderfully. Her soul reposes itself
in this land of fatness. She looks back at her life in
Dixon Street, its one room, its manifold privations,
veritable starvation hoverinq; near like the wan
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF EICHER STORE. 175
spectre of approaching doom, and the change seems
too wonderful for anything but a dream. Does she
think of the husband who shared her poverty,
whom she abandoned to endure misfortune alone,
deserted in the darkest hour of their wedded life ?
AVhen does she not think of him ? Memory and
regret are interwoven with the fabric of her life.
She consoles herself — ^justifies her desertion of
Alexis — by the idea that life must have been made
easy to him by their separation. As a married man
with a helpless wife to provide for, he was like a
vessel waterlogged ; relieved of that burden, he is the
same ship free to sail for any port in quest of fortune.
One night, in the solitude of her prettily
furnished bedroom, all rose-coloured chintz and
shining maple, furnished especially for a young
lady's occupation at Mr. Trenchard's order, Sibyl
takes out an insignificant paper-covered book from
among her most sacred possessions, and opens it
with a hand that trembles a little as she sits alone
in the lampHght. It is like opening the grave of
the past. That little sixpenny book is the diary she
kept at Mrs. Hazleton's — her brief love story.
176 DEAD men's shoes.
Tearfully, sorrowfully, she reads tliat record of
her first and only love, the story of a time when in
singleness of mind and simplicity she surrendered
her heart to its conquerer.
'I love him, I love him, I love him,' she reads,
almost blinded by tears. She remembers the gush
of passionate feeling with which those foolish words
were written. 'And one little year after I wrote
that line I deserted him,' she says to herself,
wondering at her own hardness of heart.
* What a fool I must have been when I wrote
this book ! ' This is her verdict as she closes the
volume ; yet she feels as if it were the best and
brightest part of her life in which those foolish
pages were written, and that she was happier in
those days than she is now, although she has
become a personage in Eedcastle.
She looks round her room wonderingly, glancing
at the maple wardrobe which contains so many
pretty dresses, such a treasury of ribbons and lace,
and the frivolities women love.
* Would I exchange all this, and the hope of a
fortune from my uncle, for the dismal second-floor
LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE. 177
schoolroom at Mrs. Hazleton's, and the freshness
and sweetness of first love ? ' she asks herself ; and
for a moment it seems to her that could a good fairy
give her back the days that are no more, she would
be a gainer by the exchange.
If she could know that her husband was safe
and well, that he had prospered since she left
him, or that things had gone tolerably well with
him, she might feel more at ease than she does.
But she knows nothing of what has happened to
him since the beginning of the year, when he was
seen at Eed castle, a dismal apparition ; and of this
appearance of his she only hears by chance, a few
days after her perusal of her diary, from no less a
person than her younger sister Jane, otherwise
Jenny.
Sibyl is spending the day with her uncle Eobert,
a visit which ranks as a condescension now that she
is on intimate terms with the Stormonts, the
Groshens, Dr. Mitsand, and, in a word, the elite
of Redcastle. She is received by her indulgent old
uncle with all honour. Hester prepares an extra
good dinner, a dainty little loin of veal, and a currie
VOL. I. N
178 DEAD men's shoes.
of yesterday's roast mutton, followed by tlie "un-
wonted extravagance of a tart and a pudding.
Marion sees this relaxation of the economic bow
with certain sniffings and bridlings, indicative of
suppressed indignation.
' I never knew such a time-server as Hester/ she
remarks, as she surveys the table, laid as for a feast,
a clean tablecloth in the middle of the week,
almonds and raisins for dessert, an altogether ruinous
expenditure. ' She didn't make this fuss about you
when you were at home, but now she pays her
court to the heiress elect.'
' ]^o more an heiress elect than you or Jenny, I
should imagine,' replies Sibyl, lightly. ' I think it
is pretty clear that uncle Trenchard means to leave
his money among us, though he has not said as
much.'
'Yes, and the lion's share to you, no doubt,
though he has known me longest,' says Marion,
snappishly.
* A precious sight of his money I'm likely to get,
when he never so much as asks me to go and see
him,' observes Jenny, whereupon both sisters swoop
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF ETCHER STORE. 179
down upon her in denunciation of such a noun of
quantity as ' a precious sight.'
* AVhere do you pick up your language, child ? '
cries SibyL * Xot in the streets surely, since Marion
teaches you, and you have no occasion to be running
about.'
* A fat lot Marion teaches me \ ' says the incor-
ricjible child. ' She naG^s at rae for an hour and a
half by the kitchen clock every morning, and calls
that education.'
' Pray, in what edition of Lindley ^lurray do you
find the verb " to nacr " ? ' demands Marion, with the
air of a pedagogue.
' It's as good a verb as any other. I nag, thou
naggest, he or she nags, generally she ; or take it in
Latin if you like, Nago, nagas, nagat, nagamus,
nagatis, nagant; first conjugation; perfect, nagavi.'
' I'm afraid that Jane has rather an unruly
temper,' remarks Dr. Faunthorpe, mildly.
* Oh, of course it's Jane. Marion is never ag-
gravating. You don't find me unruly, do you,
uncle ? ' Jane adds coaxingly, as she sidles up to
the gentle, easy-tempered little doctor, who has gone
180 DEAD men's shoes.
through life placidly bearing other people's burdens,
and has never murmured against a destiny that has
weighted him with three orphan nieces.
Later in the afternoon Sibyl and Jane are alone
together in the garden, Marion having lost her
temper at croquet, and left them to themselves.
The little bit of grass upon which they play is
not many sizes bigger than the billiard-table at
Lancaster House. The balls and mallets are in
the last stage of shabbiness, and chipped into icosa-
hedrons.
* You must both come to afternoon tea to-
morrow, if it's fine, and play croquet on uncle
Trenchard's lawn,' says Sibyl, condescendingly, as
if she were inviting them to her own house. Per-
haps this patronizing invitation has something to
do with Marion's loss of temper five minutes after-
wards, when Jenny sends her ball into a distant
cabbage bed. The sources of bad humour are more
often complex than simple.
It is a warm September afternoon, one of those
days in which people incline to sitting in gardens
rather than walking on dusty high roads. Sibyl
LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE. 181
sits on the grass as she was wont to do three years
ago, before she was anybody's heiress. Jenny
sprawls, with an appalling display of legs and boots
and rusty bootlaces, at her sister's side.
' Now, Sibyl' she says, eagerly, ' tell us about
the parties you go to.'
* Pray, who is your companion ? ' inquires Sibyl,
with a contemptuous droop of her heavy eyelids.
'^I see no one here but yourself.'
* I don't know what you mean,' says Jane,
staring.
'^0 more do I when you say tell us*
' Oh, lor, as if it mattered 1 You're as bad as
Marion. Now do be nice, Sib, for once in a way,
and teU me what it's like going to the Stormonts.
Only fancy you're being asked there ever so many
times ; and to think how often I've passed their
door when we've been out for walks, and the inside
of it has seemed as far off as heaven ; further, in-
deed, for they say we're sure to go to heaven if
we're good, but we're not sure of going to the
Stormonts unless we're rich. What's it like, Sib?
do teU.'
182 DEAD men's shoes.
' Well, they live in a house, as you know, since
you've seen the outside of it, and they eat their
dinner at a table, just as we do, and they are rather
stupid after dinner, and the ladies go up into the
drawing-room and talk about other people who are
not there, and a little about the minster,, and the
clergymen, and the schools, and look at one another's
dresses. I can see them count the flounces on my
dress sometimes, and actually take the pattern of it
under my nose, which I consider an impertinence.'
' Is it nice going to grand dinners ? ' asks Jane,
breathlessly.
'Yes, I suppose so. It's rather a mild kind of
enjoyment. It doesn't quicken one's pulse by a
single throb. It isn't like riding a good horse, or
seeing a race, or hearing a great singer, or even
gettincr a crood break at billiards. There's no excite-
ment, no elation; but one feels one is doing the
right kind of thing, that this is what one was born
for.'
' Are the dinners nice ? ' inquires Jenny, licking
her lips gluttonously.
' They are very grand,' replies Sibyl. ' I don't
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF EICHER STORE. 183
know tliat I should care about vol-au-vcnt a la
Fmanciere, or pdites timhales de gihier for a con-
tinuance, and with so many made dishes one has
the idea that one is eating up all the cold meat
that has accumulated in the last week ; and one gets
rather tired of seeing saddle of mutton and boiled
fowls everywhere, — for whether you call fowls ]poulets
a la BecJmmelle, or chapons en demi-deuil, they are
very much the same birds.'
' Capons in half-mourning 1 That is funny. Do
you know what my favourite dinner is, Sib ? Bul-
lock's heart with veal stuffing and currant jelly. Do
you ever have that at Colonel Stormont's ? '
' You must never mention such a dish, Jenny.
It's positively revolting/
'But you used to like it, and liver and bacon,
and sheep's head with parsley and butter. But
never mind your dinners, tell me about your beaux.
Marion says that young Mr. Stormont was in love
with her until you lured him away.'
* Marion is a fool.'
* You must have lots of lovers now that you go
into such grand society, Sib, because you are the
184 DEAD men's shoes.
beauty of the family, you know. We all know that,
and that's what makes Marion so cross sometimes.
'' I'm nobody," she says ; and then she squeezes her
waist in another half-inch, and fancies she has got
the better of you. She's awfully proud of her figure,
you know.'
'You mustn't talk disrespectfully of your elder
sister, Jenny,' remonstrates Sibyl, yawning. The
plebeian two o'clock dinner and the game of croquet
in the afternoon sun have made her sleepy.
' Then I won't talk of her at all. Tell me about
your lovers, Sib, that's a deal more interesting.*
* Nonsense, child ! I have no lovers.'
' But you had one once. Yes, I saw somebody
who was in love with you once, though he must
have gone down in the world dreadfully since you
had had anything to say to him, for he looked
little better than a beggar when I saw him.*
Sibyl has sunk into a reclining attitude, with
half-closed eyes, and is dropping into a gentle doze,
but at this speech of Jane's she starts into a sitting
posture again, and looks intently at her sister, very
pale.
lo\t:, then, had hope of eicher store. 185
' What do you mean ? * she cries. ' What was
he like ? Where did you see him ? ^Tieri ? Tell
me all about it this instant/
'Ah, I see you know the person I speak of.
You wouldn't be in such a way if you didn't. How
pale you are, Sibyl ! Do you care for him very much ?'
'Will you tell me what you are talking about,
child ? ' exclaims Sibyl, passionately.
Jane begins her story with deliberation and im-
portance.
* I have always kept it a secret,' she prefaces,
' feeling that it might get you into a row with uncle
and Marion, and I've wanted to tell you about it
ever since you came home, but have never had a
chance of being alone with you till this afternoon.'
' For goodness' sake go on. What was the man
like ? '
* Very handsome and noble-looking, though his
clothes were dreadfully shabby. His coat was shab-
bier than uncle's, snuff and all, but it looked as if
it had been a more gentlemanly coat in its day ; and
as for his poor boots, it made my heart bleed to see
them. I wanted to give him my new shilling, one
186 "DEAD men's shoes.
uncle Eobert gave me on Christmas Day, for it was
the day after New Year's Day that I saw the
man, you know '
' I know nothing. Never mind how you came
by the shilling.'
' But he pushed away my hand gently, and said,
" No, my dear, I'm not a beggar, though I dare say I
look like one." '
* Poor fellow,' sighs Sibyl.
* Oh, Sibyl, I did feel so ashamed of myself for
having offered him that shilling, — ever so much
ashameder than he did,' adds Jenn}^, coining a com-
parative in the impetuosity of her speech.
' Can't you tell me about it straight — beginning
at the beginning ? ' demands Sibyl, impatiently.
* Well, it was the day after New Year's Day. I
detest New Year's Day. Church in the morning,
and dulness in the afternoon — and I came into the
garden to have a run all by myself, and to get out
of Marion's way. It was a little after four, between
the lights, you know, and a wretchedly cold after-
noon. Well, you know the lane at the bottom of
the garden *
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE. 187
' Of course/ says Sibyl, with an involuntary
glance in that direction. Beyond the plot of
lucerne there is a low wall, and on the other side
of the wall an accommodation road leading to a
neighbouring farm. .
'Well, he was there, looking over the wall, and
he beckoned to me. I was afraid at first, thinking
he might be a robber, but as I had nothing but my
hoop to be robbed of I went up to the wall to look
at him, and then I saw somehow in a moment that
he was a gentleman, though I am sure you wouldn't
have given twopence for his hat/
' What did he say ? '
' He asked me if my name was Faunthorpe, and
then if I had a sister called Sibyl. " Yes,'' says I,
" but she's away in London.'*' " Where ? " says he.
" At Mrs. Hazleton's, Lowther Street, Eccleston
Square," says I. " Is that all you know about her ? "
says he. ** What more can I know about her ? '"' says
I. " She's very happy, I believe, and 'she's very
well, — at least, she was when uncle heard from her
last." " When was that? " says he. " About throe
weeks ago," says I. And then he sighed heavily,
188 DEAD men's shoes.
and he looked so white and tired that I pitied him
with all my heart.'
* Poor fellow/ sighed Sibyl again.
' Ah, you do know him then ? ' cries Jane.
' How can I tell ? He didn't tell you his name,
I suppose.'
' Not a bit of it. He asked me a lot of questions
about you. Did we expect you home soon ? and so
on, but I could tell him no more than I had told
him at first. You were at Mrs. Hazleton's, and you
were likely to stay there, for anything I knew. I
didn't know that uncle Eobert wanted you to come
home at that time. They don't take me into their
confidence.'
' You didn't mention uncle Trenchard ? ' asks
Sibyl, with a scared look.
' Of course not ; why should I go and mention
our rich uncle to a wandering tramp that might go
and steal his plate ? At least, I don't mean that, for
when once I had heard the poor thing speak it
never entered my mind that he was anything but a
gentleman. Who is he, Sibyl ? Do tell me. Some
one who fell in love with you in London ; saw you
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF EICHER STORE. 189
go in by Mrs. Hazleton's carriage perhaps, and fell in
love with you at first sight, and followed you about
everywhere, and neglected his profession, and went
to the dogs for your sake. Do tell me all about him.'
' How do I know who the man was ? ' says Sibyl,
absently. There is no shadow of doubt in her mind.
This wanderer was her husband, who had come to
Eedcastle in quest of her.
' I'll describe him if you like. I can see him
before me at this moment. He is tall and dark,
with rather large features, regular features, but
striking, not one of those straight-nosed waxwork
faces one sees in a hairdresser's shop. His lower
lip projects a little, which gives him rather a
scornful look till he smiles, and then he has the
kindest expression. "Dear child," he said, and
patted my shoulder so kindly, " you are just a little
like your sister when you look up at me as you are
looking now." You won't think that a compliment,
I know, Sib, but he said it. Who is he, Sib ? Do
tell me.'
* I have not the remotest idea,' replies Sibyl,
with provoking indifference.
190 DEAD men's shoes.
' Come now, you wouldn't have been so agitated
when I spoke about him if you hadn't guessed who
he was.'
' I was not agitated,' says Sibyl, pretending to
yawn.
' Oh, very well, if you like to tell crammers, of
course I can't help it. My experience of elder
sisters is that they may break all the command-
ments with impunity, and drive a coach and six
through the Catechism. I think they wash their
hands of Christianity when they're confirmed.'
' Jane, you are not only bhisphemous, but you're
extremely impertinent, to me' exclaims Sibyl.
' Well, if that's all I get for keeping your secrets ! '
' That was wise of you at any rate, Jenny,' says
Sibyl, making haste to relent. ' Marion would have
made no end of mischief out of nothing. Never
mind the man in the lane, dear. We'll forget all
about him. He was some foolish fellow, no doubt.
And if you'd like a new frock for Sunday, Jenny^
you shall have that pretty checked peach-coloured
silk of mine, and I'll get Miss Eylett to make it up
for you.'
LOVE, THEX, HAD HOPE OF PJCHER STORE. 191
' Oil you dear ! ' cries Jane, crimsoning with
rapture. ' That lovely peach-colour ! How sweet I
shall look, if — '. with a doubtful look at her well-
worn boots — '• if uncle Eobert will only give me
new boots.'
' If he won't, I know somebody else who will.
And, Jenny, if you could contrive to keep your hair
a little smoother, and your hands a shade cleaner,
you wouldn't be the worst-looking child in Eed-
castle,' says Sibyl, drawing her younger sister
towards her, and bestowing a condescending kiss
upon that young person's forehead. 'Xow mind
when you come to afternoon tea with me to-morrow
you make yourself look as nice as ever you can.'
'I'll do my best. Sib, but I know I shall feel
shabby before those stuck-up servants. When is
uncle Trenchaid going to have Clarion to stay with
him again, do you think ? '
' I don't know. That's a question I can't ask
him, you see.'
' I suppose not ; but Marion's rather cut up at
his not inviting her, you know. I say, Sib, I fancy
Marion's nose is out of joint since you've come home.'
192 DEAD men's shoes.
Sibyl smiles — a self-satisfied smile. She is very
sure of her uncle's preference — knows quite well
that he considers Marion something of a simpleton,
and not a little of a bore.
' It isn't my fault, Jenny, if uncle Trenchard
likes me best,' she says, complacently.
The sisters go in to tea after this, Jenny with her
arm round Sibyl's waist.
'I say, Sib, when you're married, and have a
beautiful house of your own, you'll have me to stay
with you sometimes, won't you ? I'll be good, and
keep my hair tidy.'
* I mean never to marry, Jane ; at least, not
during uncle Trenchard's lifetime. I mean to keep
his house for him, always.'
' But he may live to be ninety — twenty years to
come, — and a nice old woman you'd be by that time.
Who'd have you then ? You ought to marry now,
Sib, while you have such advantages ; that's what
uncle Eobert says. Do be married soon, that's a
dear, and let me be your bridesmaid — in white
muslin over pink silk. Is Frederick Stormont very
nice ? '
LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE. 193
* He's absolutely detestable/ replies Sibyl, and
irnmediately without rhyme or reason bursts into
tears. She is thinking of the fond and faithful
husband who came to Eedcastle in quest of her, and
departed hopeless. '
Where is he? what is he doing? how has he fared
since that bleak January afternoon when he found
his journey had been useless ? Starving, perhaps ;
or worse — dead. Slain by his own hand in some
dark hour of despair. Has she not reason to fear
the worst of one she left without hope ?
Three days later, by the help of her old ally,
Mrs. Hazleton's housemaid, Jane Dimond, Sibyl
contrives to insert the following advertisement in
the second column of the Times supplement : —
* S. S. to Alexis. — You are not forgotten. In all
I do I am faithful to you and your interests. I
look forward to our reunion. Wait and hope, as I
do. Write and tell me where you are, and what you
are doing, — Address, S. S., Post Office, Hale Street,
Pimlico/
This advertisement is inserted three times, and
the housemaid inquires diligently at the Hale Street
VOL. L O
194 DEAD men's shoes.
Post Office during the following fortnight for a
letter addressed to S. S. No such letter comes, and
Sibyl's vague fears of evil are intensified by this
ominous silence.
CHAPTEE XIII.
THE SWEETS OF LIFE.
XoT a word has been said by Mr. Trenchard as
to bis testamentary intentions in reference to his
three nieces, but in the niiod of Eedcastle it is
an established fact that Sibyl is to inherit the bulk
of her uncle's property. The other two girls will
get something, no doubt, ^Irs. Stormont remarks
obligingly to Mrs. Groshen, the banker's wife^ as
those two ladies take their afternoon tea together,
ceremoniously, in the Stormont drawing-room, a
spacious apartment with a good deal of white
paneling, gold moulding, and looking-glass, and not
much besides in the way of furniture, a barren tract
of Brussels carpet, with an islet here and there in
the shape of sofa, ottoman, or coffee-table.
'The other two girls will get something, of
course — two hundred a year each, perhaps : and a
very nice income too, for young women not Kkely
196 DEAD men's shoes.
to marry. But mark my words, Mrs. Groshen, Sibyl
is the heiress. Mr. Trenchard positively doats
upon her.'
'Do you think her pretty V asked the banker's
wife, languidly. She has been esteemed a beauty
in her time, on the strength of an aquiline nose and
a large pale blue eye, and she does not particularly
approve of these new lights.
' Well, yes, decidedly pretty — in her peculiar
style. Features rather too sharp, perhaps, and a
sad want of colour.' The Miss Stormonts rejoice
in vivid complexions. ' But she has fine eyes.'
'Yes, fine eyes,' assents Mrs. Groshen.
' Though I cannot say I like their expression.
* No more do I,' says Mrs. Groshen, warmly.
'Perhaps the nicest thing about her is her
manner. She has really charming manners.'
'Ye-es, very agreeable manners,' drawls Mrs.
Groshen.
'If they were not so painfully a,rtificial.'
'That's the very thing that struck me,' says
Mrs. Groshen, brightening.
The banker's wife rustles home in her silk
THE SWEETS OF LIFE. 197
attire, and tells Mr. Groshen at dinner liow the
Stormonts are trying their uttermost to catch
Mr. Trenchard's niece for their empty-headed son
Frederick.
* This Mr. Trenchard is very rich, I suppose ? '
she says, interrogatively.
* Enormously. I wish he'd keep an account with
us,' replies the banker.
Sibyl accepts all the homage Eedcastle can
offer her, with a tranquillity which raises her not
a little in the estimation of the elite. She takes
Mrs. Stormont's somewhat oppressive kindness as
a matter of course, and is unawed ^oy the splendour
of the Groshens' dinner-table, which for plate, china,
glass, floral decoration, and hothouse fruit, takes
precedence of other tables in Eedcastle.
*1 don't pretend to do things as Mrs. Groshen
does,' the Eedcastle matrons inform one another
apologetically. 'We can't all be bankers.'
Mrs Stormont volunteers her services in escort-
ing Sibyl to concerts, and other local entertainments
which a man of Mr. Trenchard's age may not care
to patronize. Stephen Trenchard is quite willing
198 DEAD men's shoes.
that Sibyl should take advantage of these friendly
offers, but, to his surprise, and perhaps gratification,
the girl refuses.
' I am very fond of music, uncle Trenchard,'
she says, 'but I shall not go out of an evening
without you. That would be a pretty way of
keeping you company.'
* But, my dear, there is some difference be-
tween seventy and twenty. Crabbed age and youth
cannot dwell together; or if they do, youth must
have a holiday now and then.'
'You are not crabbed, and I am very happy
with you/ answers Sibyl.
'Flatterer,' exclaims Stephen Trenchard, not the
less pleased.
'Artful hussy,' thinks Mrs. Stormont, and by-
and-by in the course of that cutting and wounding
which passes for conversation in Eedcastle, that lady
informs Mrs. Groshen that Sibyl Faunthorpe is
one of the deepest girls it was ever her fate to
encounter.
'She'll have that old man's money, my dear,
every sixpence,' says Mrs. Stormont, emphatically.
THE s^^^:ETS of life. 199
' Then your Fred ought to have her.'
' Why, you see, my dear, these Faunthorpes are
people of no family.'
'You mean that he has asked her and been
refused,' remarks Mrs. Groshen, astutely.
* I don't think a Stormont is likely to find him-
self rejected by a parish doctor's niece,' replies the
colonel's wife, with suppressed indignation. 'As to
]Mr. Trenchard's fortune, it is nothing to boast of
after all. It has all come from trade.'
This is a thrust at the banking business.
' I fancy that is the source of most people's
money now-a-days,' returns Mrs. Groshen, blandly.
' Professional men seldom seem to have much.'
Hereupon the two ladies, having indulged in
a few friendly passes on their own account, return
to the slaughter of the absent, and kiss each other
affectionately at parting.
Sibyl's dissipations are therefore, by her own
desire, confined to those festivities to which Mr.
Trenchard is bidden, and which take the dignified
and substantive form of dinners. No one could
think of inviting the master of Lancaster Lodge to
200 DEAD men's shoes.
* come in ' in the evening. Dinners of first quality,
Al at Lloyd's, are those to which Mr. Trenchard
is bidden, and very splendid are the banquets
with which at longish intervals he gratifies his
friends in return. Wonderful is the regard which
Eedcastle has for Mr. Trenchard, and its eagerness
to win and retain his friendship. It is not to be
supposed that the elite have any expectation of
profiting in a direct manner by his wealth. They
have none. But they like to adorn their table with
a rich man. They like to put him forward as one
of their best friends, and to know that less privileged
people are smitten with envy. They invite him
very much for the same reason that they buy costly
fruit out of season, and waxen blossoms from the
hothouse instead of homely roses ripened in the sun.
He reflects honour and glory upon themselves. It
is a distinction to be on intimate terms with so
much money. Mr. Trenchard's Eedcastle friends
brag about his wealth as if it were their own, smack
their lips as they tell each other his income, and
that he has never less than fifty thousand at call,
in case some sudden opportunity for a stroke of
THE SWEETS OF LIFE. 201
business should crop up in Calcutta. Has Stephen
Trenchard told his new friends the amount of his
income, or the sum he keeps uninvested ? Hardly,
for he is the most reticent of men as to his own
affairs. But Eedcastle has a knack of evolving facts
about other people's business out of its inner
consciousness.
A year has slipped away, unawares almost it
seems to Sibyl, despite lurking pangs of remorse,
silent hours given to regret. Life at Lancaster
Lodge is such an easy thing. It is so pleasant to
have everything one desires, to be praised and
petted, and invited here, there, and everywhere, and
to refuse the most flattering invitations upon the
last fashionable absurdity in note-paper. Pleasant,
in a word, to be Miss Faunthorpe of Lancaster
Lodge, instead of Miss Faunthorpe of nowhere.
There is something of the lotus-eater's dreamy
idlesse assuredly in this reposeful existence at
Lancaster Lodge.
Conscience has been lapped to sleep before the
year is out, and Sibyl has persuaded herself that
Alexis Secretan has carved his way to independence
202 DEAD men's shoes.
somehow or other, and is getting on very well
indeed in some distant quarter of the globe, whence
he will doubtless return by some happy conjuncture
of events soon after uncle Trenchard's death, which
calamity in the course of nature will come to pass
in a few years.
' And then we shall both be amply rewarded
for the sacrifice we have made in this separation/
muses Sibyl, as if the separation had been a
voluntary one on her husband's side as well as her
own.
Mr. Trenchard takes life tolerably easily con-
sidering that he has his own way in everything, an
indulgence which acts as an irritant upon some
dispositions. He is feared and obeyed in his own
house, flattered and caressed out of it. His
servants work for him as no other man's servants
work, and obey, and tremble at his footstep. He
accepts all that Eedcastle can give him, dines out
a good deal among the elite, tells his prosy old
Indian stories again and again, to listeners who
always laugh in the right places. He enjoys the
homage offered to his wealth, and chuckles over the
THE SWEETS OF LIFE. 203
weakness of his flatterers as lie drives home with
his niece.
' If my name were in the Gazette next Wednesday
morning, before Wednesday night I should be friend-
less/ he says ; ' and the people we have dined with
this evening would be gloating over my downfall.'
' Oh, uncle ! they would be sorry, surely,'
exclaims Sibyl, more for the sake of conversation
than from any belief in the good-heartedness of her
friends.
'Sorry that they had been taken in — that they
had mistaken a poor man for a rich one, no doubt ;
but for me, not a whit. Society in a place like
Eedcastle is made up on the co-operative system —
is a club to which a man is admitted upon certain
understood conditions. The first of these is that
he should be well off.'
' Luckily you are never likely to put our friends
to the test,' says Sibyl.
' Of course not. And in the meanwhile there's
no harm in calling them friends. One name does
as well as another when you are talking of un-
realities.'
204 DEAD men's shoes.
The year lias gone, and Marion has not been
asked to stay with her uncle Trenchard — a fact
which she resents bitterly, and ascribes to double-
dealing on the part of Sibyl. She has been at
Lancaster Lodge tolerably often, but only as Sibyl's
visitor, and although she accepts all Sibyl's invi-
tations, it is almost unbearable to be invited and
patronized by a sister. Sibyl has established herself
as Mr. Trenchard's adopted daughter. He coolly
declares that she suits him better than Marion, and
that she is to keep his house till she marries.
' I suppose I must have made myself very dis-
agreeable to him in the three months I spent
here,' remarks Marion one bright April afternoon,
digging her croquet ball into the ground with mis-
used energy. She has come to spend the afternoon
with Sibyl.
'No, dear, I don't think it was so bad as that,'
replies Sibyl, graciously ; ' but you didn't succeed in
making yourself agreeable to him.'
* I know I made myself a perfect slave,'
complains the injured Marion; 'toasting his news-
papers, and running for his slippers, and peeling
THE SWEETS OF LIFE. 205
walnuts for hini till my fingers were black. I'm
sure I don't know what he wants — the nasty old
thing ! '
• Now really, Marion, I can't consent to hear the
best of uncles called names, — on his own croquet
lawn, too.'
' Very much the best of uncles for you, but give
me uncle Eobert/
*Well, my dear, you've got him. Haven't I
left you in undisturbed possession of our paternal
uncle ? '
* All I can say is that it is positive injustice,
murmurs Marion, as the game proceeds.
Frederick Stormont strolls in five minutes after-
wards and takes a mallet, whereupon the sisters
become all smiles and graciousness. He goes in to
afternoon tea with them, and they sit on the crimson
brocade sofas sipping orange pekoe out of Indian tea-
cups, waited on by the most accomplished of foot-
men, and discussing the petty gossip of Above and
Below Bar. An empty life assuredly. But it is
pleasant to sit in a handsome room, almost an
indoor garden in its abundance of choicest flowers,
206 DEAD men's shoes.
a sunlit lawn beyond the open windows ; pleasant
to be dressed in the last fashion; pleasant to be
admired, even though the eyes of the admirer are
pale in hue and porcine in shape ; pleasant to feel
that in life's eager race one has shot ever so far
ahead of one's younger sister. So, at least, feels
Sibyl as she accepts Mr. Stormont's vapid homage,
and allows Marion to be useful as her foil.
Mrs. Groshen is strictly incorrect in her con-
jecture about this young man's wooing. Frederick
has not been rejected by Mr. Trenchard's niece. He
has not yet ventured to propose to her, and when
pushed hard upon the subject by his father, he
always asks for time.
'I think she likes me,' he says complacently,
* but, by Jove, you know it doesn't do for a man to
hurry that kind of thing ; you're so impatient, you
see, you want a fellow to round the Cape before he's
got across the Bay of Biscay. Miss Faunthorpe has
a good deal of reserve about her and that kind of
thing, and she's just the sort of girl to throw over
a fellow who proposed to her before she'd quite
made up her mind about liking him.'
THE SWEETS OP LIFE. 207
' She's a long time making up lier mind about
you/ replies the colonel, pensively. ' And upon
my word, you know, Fred, if you don't marry a
woman with money you'll have to do something for
yourseK. Things can't go on like this much longer.
By Jove, you know, you'll have to emigrate. I don't
see that there's anything you could do in England,
You're too old for the army, or the navy, or the civil
service ; you'll have to try the colonies.'
' I might do something, kangaroo-shooting in
New Zealand,' says Frederick, meditatively.
* Hang it, sir ! a man can't get his livin'
kangaroo-shootin', ' roars the colonel. ' You'd better
marry Trenchard's niece.'
' She's a very jolly girl,' says Fred, vaguely.
He would have called Electra or Antigone, Joan of
Arc or Mary Stuart, jolly. He knows no higher
praise to bestow on the woman of his choice.
CHAPTEE XIV.
MAKING EEADY FOR VICTORY.
The fair spring days flit by ; the violets and prim-
roses, bluebells and wind-flowers, fade in the copses,
unseen, unknown, uncared for, save by a few peasant
children ; the white blossoms of the pears — the
pinky bloom of the apples — have drifted away on
the light west winds like summer snow ; ferns
uncurl their tender fronds in thicket and lane, and
stand up to hail the summer. The cuckoo's last call
dies in the silence of the wood, the skylark's clear
carol rings out above the tall green corn. Summer
has come — summer has come — and the little
children of Eedcastle — the children of the com-
monality, at least — wander far afield under the mid-
day sun, and lose themselves in distant woods, and
drain the cup of summer joys to the dregs. The
children of the elite regard summer as a period in
which they wear starched frocks, find French and
MAKIXG KEADY FOR VICTORY. 209
German grammar more than usually oppressive, and
entertain hopes of going to the sea-side.
Sibyl welcomes June and the roses with a languic^
greeting. That smooth, easy life has begun to pall a
little on Stephen Trenchard's niece. Despite its
pleasantness, it is at best a monotonous existence,
and youth's eager spirit revolts against monotony.
Xot willingly would Sibyl confess even to herself
that she is tired of Lancaster Lodge and Eedcastle
dinner parties, Eedcastle compliments, Eedcastle life
altogether.
She wishes that her uncle would extend the
circle of his acquaintance, yet is obliged to admit
that it would not be easy for him to do so at Eed-
castle. The county people have not called upon
Mr. Trenchard. Aloof in their fastnesses among
the hills and moors, the county people refuse to bow
to the golden calf, hug themselves in their social
privileges, and do not recognise the fact of an old
gentleman having made money in India as a reason
why they should go out of the beaten track to take
notice of him. From their lofty region of territorial
estate they look down with an equal disdain upon
VOL. I. p
210 DEAD men's shoes.
professional and commercial people wlio live in a
town and call five acres of garden and paddock land.
Stephen Trenchard's million is nothing to them, or
if they think of his wealth at all, it is with resent-
ment, as a sign of the times, and an irrefutable
proof that England is going to the dogs.
Perhaps it is the very fact of the county people's
exclusiveness which makes Sibyl regard them with
a certain amount of interest. Those big broad-
shouldered young men she has seen ride past her
window in the hunting season, sitting their horses
much more easily than Frederick Stormont sits his
chair, glorious in ' pink ' and buckskins, loud voiced,
large whiskered, seem to her of a different race from
young Groshen, or young Stormont, or Dr. Mitsand's
pale-faced spectacled son, whose manly vigour has
degenerated into brains, Mr. T wells the curate,
or Mr. Jewson the lawyer. To her fancy there is
something grand about these sons of the soil, a rough
nobility, an outspoken contempt for the petty con-
ventionalities which constitute the small despotism
of Eedcastle society. Ccesar est swpra grammaticam.
The county people are above good manners — that
MAKING READY FOR VICTORY. 211
is to say, good manners as understood in Eed-
castle.
The town and the county meet occasionally
in the hunting-field, where the county looks on
with a smile at some of the town's feats in horse-
manship, leaves the town three fields behind
for the most part, and now and then deposits the
town in ditches or hangs it out to dry on a stiff
bullfinch.
Twice in every year town and county meet on
equal ground. Eedcastle, small and obscure as it is
in the eyes of the outer world, boasts a racecourse,
and as pretty a course in a small way as any in
England. Less than a mile out of the to^\Tl, on that
broad open common known as Eedcastle Woods,
gleam the white posts of the course, and the white
walls of the stand, a permanent and substantial
building. Eedcastle has its spring and summer
meeting, two days on each occasion — and just the
merriest two days in that part of the world.
Granted that horses of much weight or prestige
rarely appear at Eedcastle ; the fact only leaves
the ground open to the horses of the local
212 DEAD men's shoes.
aristocracy, and makes the races so much the more
interesting to Eedcastle itself.
Sibyl has never seen a race in her life, and
it was not without a struggle that she declined
Mrs. Stormont's invitation to join her party at the
spring meeting. Now comes the summer meeting,
and another invitation from the leader of Eedcastle
society.
' Eose and Violet,' the dear girls are named after
those favourite flowers — five feet ten each of them,
and with the complexions of cookmaids ; — ' Eose
and Violet will be so disappointed if you refuse to
join our party, my dear Sibyl. Of course I say
nothing of Fred's feelings.'
' Why don't you go with them, child ? ' asks
Mr. Trenchard, when Sibyl reads him the letter,
laughing as she reads.
' I don't care for pleasures that you cannot share,
uncle.'
' Nonsense, my dear ! I could share this if I
liked. For my part, I could never understand what
people could see in a race, unless as a hazardous
investment with the possibility of enormous returns.
MAKING EEADY FOR ^^CTOEY. 213
I can fancy a bookman enjoying the races in a
business-like way ; but for people to sit in their
carriages to look on at other people winning or
losing, and call it pleasure, that passes my compre-
hension.'
' I should like to see a race for once in my life/
says Sibyl, languishing for any novel sensation that
may ruffle the mUl-pond of her existence.
'Then write and accept Mrs. Stormont's in-
vitation, my dear.'
'You won't think me unkind for going without
you?'
* I should think you much more unkind if you
wanted me to go with you.'
So it is settled. Sibyl tells her dear Mrs.
Stormont that she is charmed to accept her kind
invitation, and summons Miss Eylett to immediate
counsel. She has ever so many pretty dresses in
her wardrobe, but she must have something new for
this occasion, with a view to crushing dear Violet
and Rose by the exhibition of a dress they have
never seen before. The invitation has been given a
week before the races, so there is time for
214 DEAD men's shoes.
preparation. The council is a solemn one, and by
the intensity of Sibyl's desire to look her best may
be measured her hatred of dear Eose and Violet.
'Now mind, Miss Eylett,' she begins, after she
has looked through Le Follet and pronounced all the
illustrations 'hideous,' 'I must have nothing that
can possibly look like a shopkeeper's wife's Sunday
gown — no flaming pink or blue that people can see
a mile off '
* Mauve, or a rich voylet, now,' suggests Miss
Eylett, in her persuasive voice.
'My dear Eylett, mauve and violet are the
colours vulgar people choose when they want to be
genteel.'
* A sweet French grey.'
' Give me a housemaid's afternoon gown at
once.'
* A cinnamon brown.'
'A doctor's wife's dinner dress. No, I must
have some pale indistinct colour softened with a
cloud of India muslin. A dress which looks nothing
particular at a distance, but which is fit for a
princess when you come to look into it. Mr.
MAKING READY FOR ^^CTORY. 215
Trenchard gave me an embroidered Indian mnslin,
which will be just the thing, over a pale maize
corded silk, — you know the shade I mean, straw-
colour shot with apricot.'
Sibyl opens a huge camphor chest, in which
she keeps her treasures, and displays a muslin
dress fine as a cobweb, and covered with em-
broidery.
'Exquisite !' exclaims Miss Eylett ; 'what taste
you have, Miss Faunthorpe ! '
She would have been just as enthusiastic had
Sibyl suggested pickled-cabbage colour, picked out
with pea-green.
'And you must make me a bonnet exactly to
match the dress.'
' Of course, Miss Faunthorpe, I'll go round to
Carmichael's at once, and see if they've got the
colour ; and if they haven't I'll take the three o'clock
train to Krampston.'
This question settled, Sibyl feels easy in her
mind, and looks forward to next week with pleasure.
The summer is at its hei^^ht — mid Julv, — and a
delicious July, warm, dry, ripening roses and
216 DEAD men's shoes.
ripening corn, swelling the peaches on the wall, and
reddening the apples in the orchard — all the land
basking in the sun, and Eedcastle High Street a
place to look at blinkingly between two and five
in the afternoon, and a burning ploughshare to
walk upon. Marion and Jenny come toiling along
the sun-baked pavement in the very hottest hour
of the afternoon to visit their prosperous sister, —
Jane splendid in the peach-coloured silk and new
boots, and a hat that is too small for her large round
head, with its thick brown hair in curls that no
application of the hair-brush will reduce from their
disorder to the smoothness of civilization.
Sibyl receives her sisters languidly, under the
plane trees, exhausted by her interview with Miss
Eylett, Marion's temper is not improved by the
warm walk, or by the labour of getting Jenny up
in a style befitting Lancaster Lodge.
' There never was such a troublesome child,' she
complains as she sinks into a rustic arm-chair,
conscious that her face is the colour of a boiled
lobster, while Sibyl, in cream-coloured Indian silk,
and a turquoise blue sash, is looking divinely pale.
M\KIXG EEADY FOR VICTOKY. 217
' Look at her lesfs. She has orrown out of that frock
already; and as for ever keeping her decently
dressed, I defy you. There's the print of a slice of
bread and butter on the front breadth, and smears of
marmalade all over the sleeves, thoucrh she's onlv
worn the frock on Sundays.'
* Let her wear it every day find wear it out,
says Sibyl, generously ; * she shall have another for
best.'
' Oh, you dear ! ' cries Jenny ; ' but if you knew
what a life Marion leads me when IVe a good frock
on you might think it a greater charity never to give
me one.'
'You ungrateful minx,' exclaims Marion, 'didn't
I stand half an hour this broiling afternoon doing
your hair ? '
* PuUing it, you mean,' responds Jenny. ' If
you'd combed it with a hay-fork and brushed it
with a bush harrow you couldn't have hurt me
more.'
'There's gratitude ! ' ejaculates Marion, pointing
to the offender.
' My idea of gratitude is thankfulness for things
218 DEAD men's shoes.
we want,' reasons Jenny, who is good at argument.
' I didn't want my hair pulled.'
' Well, Sibyl,' says Marion, ' is uncle Trenchard.
going to the races ? '
Everybody thinks and talks of the races at this
time. It is the one subject of conversation in
Redcastle. A rare thing for Eedcastle to have so
much as one subject of conversation; as a rule,
the town contrives to be conversational about
nothing.
' No, uncle Trenchard hates races. I am going
with the Stormonts.'
'Indeed! I thought you wouldn't go anywhere
without your uncle.*
' No more I would in an ordinary way, but I felt
a kind of interest in the races. One hears so much
of them.'
'I feel a kind of interest in them too,' says
Marion, with an injured air. * I've been hearing
about Eedcastle races ever since I left school, and
yet, living so near, I've never seen them. Uncle
Robert has got a pony that would take us, but he
has not got the spirit. You might have asked uncle
MAKING READY FOR VICTORY. 219
Trenchard to let you take us all in his barouche. I
dare say uncle Eobert would have gone if you'd
taken him.'
Sibyl looks doubtful as to the delight of such a
family party.
*I've accepted Mrs. Stormont's invitation, you
see,' she replies, apologetically.
' Oh yes, of course, catch you putting yourself
out of the way for anybody ! Another girl in your
position might have thought of her poor relations.
What are you going to wear ? '
Sibyl describes the costume which she and Miss
Eylett have arranged that morning. Poor Marion
listens in an agony of envy.
'What a lot of money uncle Trenchard must
give you!' she exclaims.
' No, he doesn't give me much, but he allows me
to keep an account at Carmichael's.'
' Well,' sighs Marion, * I would give a year of my
life to go to the races this day week.'
* What a pity our lives are not transferable like
railway stock/ says Sibyl, airily. She is not deeply
moved by Marion's piteous condition. Her mind
220 DEAD men's shoes.
is occupied with a prophetic vision of her triumphs
next Wednesday. She will see and be seen by the
county. That idea is more inspiring than the
prospect of a day spent with the Stormonts, whom
she knows by heart, or even the privilege of behold-
ing Mrs. Groshen's raiment, which is sure to be
resplendent and of the very latest fashion, however
hideous in the abstract and individually unbecoming
that fashion may be.
CHAPTER XV.
TOWN AND COUNTY.
A CURIOUS thing happens that evening after
dinner. It is Mr. Trenchard's habit to read the
daily papers at his ease in the drawing-room as
soon as he has withdrawn from the dinner-table ;
or, if he is idly disposed, Sibyl reads to him, and
beguiles him into placid slumber. This evening he
reads the papers for himself, beginning, as usual,
with the Times, which he studies profoundly. He
sits in his easy chaii^ by one open window. Sibyl
yawns over a novel at another. Eather drear}-
these summer evenings at Lancaster Lodge, when
twilight's purple shadows rise ghost-like among the
trees on the lawn, and the gates are closed upon the
outer world. Welcome even such commonplace in-
terruption as the advent of Frederick Stormont, and
an adjournment to the billiard-room.
Sibyl looks up from her book with a start at a
222 DEAD men's shoes.
sudden movement of her uncle's. What was that
half-stifled exclamation which sounded so like an
oath ? Stephen Trenchard is standing up, with the
paper crumpled in his right hand, staring blankly at
his niece. She goes to him, looks at him in
frightened interrogation; but he neither sees nor
hears her. Is this some kind of seizure, — epileptic,
paralytic? She thinks so, tremblingly, for a
moment, before Mr. Trenchard's keen black eyes
resume their power of vision and look into hers.
' Dearest uncle, what is the matter ? '
* Nothing that need concern you, Sibyl. A friend,
an old friend of mine, dead in India. The an-
nouncement of his death shocked me, that's all. I
ought not to have been surprised. At my age a
man must expect old friends to drop off. Go back
to your book, my dear. There is no reason for you
to be agitated.'
Sibyl looks wonderingly at the paper in her
uncle's hand. It is not the supplement. That,
with its births, marriages, and deaths, lies on the
carpet imopened. She remembers that the deaths
of distinguished people are sometimes recorded in
TOWN AND COUNTY, 223
the body of the paper, and this friend of her uncle's
is doubtless a person worthy of an obituary
paragraph.
•I am so sorry,' she says sympathetically.
' So am I. But it was to be expected. Go back
to your book, child.'
Perceiving that sympathy is not required, Sibyl
returns to her seat by the distant window. Marion
would have hung about her uncle for a quarter of
an hour bemoaning his loss and offering stale
crumbs of consolation.
Sibyl hears the door shut ten minutes after-
wards, and looking up, sees that Stephen Trenchard
has vanished. She hastens to look for the news-
papers, eager to find out all she can about her
uncle's departed friend ; but Mr. Trenchard has
taken the papers with him, and when she searches
for them next day in his study and in other likely
places, they are not to be found. Xor does Mr.
Trenchard reappear that evening. The butler brings
Sibyl a message at tea-time to the effect that his
master has letters to write, and will take tea in his
study. So that particular infusion of hyson with
224 DEAD men's shoes.
which Mr. Trenchard is in the habit of irritating his
nerves is carried to the study on a salver, and Sibyl
is left to spend her evening alone.
There are times, on just such an evening as this,
when memory recalls that one room in Dixon Street,
Chelsea, and his company whose easy temper and
natural gaiety of heart could brighten deepest
poverty with an occasional ray of light.
' If T could have borne poverty as well as he, we
might have struggled on together to the end,' she
thinks, with a touch of remorse. * But then what a
pity it would have been to lose uncle Trenchard's
fortune ! How ghastly pale he looked to-night, poor
dear man ! '
Mr. Trenchard seems a little out of sorts for the
next few days, not quite so keen and far-seeing, so
exacting or high-handed in his household as it is
his wont to be. He has a preoccupied air, a
thoughtful look, and is evidently much concerned
by the loss of that departed friend whose name he
has not mentioned.
Sibyl wonders at this a little, never having heard
Mr. Trenchard talk of any intimate friend in India.
TOWN AXD COUNTY. 225
He has told numerous stories of Calcutta society, of
trade and chicanery in that palatial city ; but of
friendship, of intimate congenial companions, he has
not breathed a word. Nor in the year and a half of
his residence at Eedcastle has a single Anglo-Indian
acquaintance visited him. Impossible to imagine a
man more independent of friendship, yet he seems
cut to the quick by the death of this distant friend,
and is slow to recover his equanimity.
Mrs. Stormont calls about three days before the
races, and finds Mr. Trenchard and his niece on the
lawn, the gentleman asleep, or meditating, his coun-
tenance shrouded by an orange-coloured bandanna,
like a new veiled prophet, the lady working point
lace at the rate of a stitch a minute.
The kind soul has come to talk about the races.
' I wish you could be induced to join us, dear
Mr. Trenchard.'
'You're very good, my dear madam, but the thing
is not in my way. I hardly know whether a horse
should have four legs or six. If you were to show
me a six-legged animal I doubt if I should remark
the redundancy.'
VOL. T. o
226 DEAD men's shoes.
' And yet you have the finest carriage horses in
Eedcastle.'
' Because I did not choose them myself, madam.'
'I shall call for you at half-past twelve, my
dear,' says Mrs. Stormont, turning to Sibyl. 'Fred
is going to ride. I shall hire Shrub's landau and
pair. My poor dear ponies would be frightened to
death on a racecourse.'
Shrub is the proprietor of the George Hotel and
livery stables^ and has the honour of ministering to
the Mite on all state occasions.
* Why hire Shrub's landau when my barouche is
at your service ? ' asks Mr. Trenchard. ' I shall be
glad to give that idle coachman of mine a day's
work.'
'My dear Mr. Trenchard, you are too kind.
Such an idea never entered my head.'
' Odd if it didn't,' thinks Sibyl, * when you are
always making use of the carriage in some way or
other.'
The S torments have allowed Sibyl to drive them
a good deal during the last few months, to the in-
finite relief of the ponies and the buck-bai^et, both
TOWN AND COUNTY. 227
of which institutions are slightly the worse for
wear. You may get fifteen years' good work out
of a pony, but when he approaches his majority
his powers are apt to wane.
Mrs. Stormont allows herself to be entreated,
and finally yields gracefully, and with an airy
coquetry, but only on condition that Mr. Trench-
ard shall dine with them on the race day. This
he promises, with certain reservations.
'If I feel myself up to the mark, I'll come,'
he says, 'but I have not been particularly well
lately.'
' Uncle Trenchard has lost an old friend in
India,' explains Sibyl, and seeing her uncle's
impatient frown, is sorry she has made the
remark.
'Indeed!' exclaims Mrs. Stormont, thirsting for
information. ' In the civil service or the army ?
The colonel has so many old Indian friends.'
* My friend was neither in the civil service nor
the army,' says Mr. Trenchard, and says no more.
Mrs. Stormont is disappointed, but she has got
the carriage, which was the object of her visit, so
228 DEAD men's shoes.
she drifts off into the usual Eedcastle talk. ' Have
you seen the Groshens lately V and 'Did you hear
that Dr. Mitsand has been very ill V and so on ;
with which interesting discourse she beguiles the
next half-hour.
The race day conies with the calendar, and a
glorious day, hot blue sky, roads white with dust,
grass brown and slippery, bad for the horses, opine
the learned in such matters. The grand stand is
gleaming in the sun, flags are flying, the town is all
astir, flies are driving to and fro between station and
racecourse, with visitors from Krampston, people who
smell of commerce and dockyard, oakum and tar, a
rough lot in the estimation of genteel Eedcastle. At
half-past twelve the Trenchard barouche calls for
Mrs. Stormont and her two daughters ; Sibyl has
taken her place in it already. She wishes to sit with
her back to the horses, but this Mrs. Stormont will
not allow, and after a little polite skirmishing she
takes her place next that lady, the Miss Stormonts
side by side on the opposite seat, which they fill
to overflowing. On the way to the course the
ladies have time for a silent review of each other's
TOWN AND COUNTY. 229
apparel. Eose and Violet are in washed musKns
and home-made bonnets. Mrs. Stormont wears her
dove-coloured moire, wdiich is an institution in Eed-
castle, and as well known as the town clock.
' Here comes Mrs. Groshen's carriage. I suppose
she is going to crush us with some new finery,'
says Eose, with a venomous look at the maize silk
and India muslin.
'I hope it will be in a little better taste than
usual/ remarks Violet, wlio is of a more calculating
temper than her sister. ' What lovely embroidery
that is of yours, Sibyl! I can't help noticmg it.'
Frederick joins the party presently, on a brute
of a gray horse, whose ownership he participates
with young Jewson, the lawyer's son. The joint
animal, having very little mouth to speak of at
the best, and being ridden on opposite principles by
his two proprietors, is about as manageable as a
watering-place donkey. Frank Jewson, w^ho is the
better equestrian of the co-owners, boasts that he
rides with his knees. Fred Stormont hangs on by
the reins, and makes the wretched quadruped's
mouth his fulcrum. He is not happy on horseback
230 DEAD men's shoes.
himself, or the cause of happiness to his steed, and
the joint proprietorship is an extravagance which
he can ill afford. But he feels that the horse gives
him social status, and endures bravely. The beast
is consistent, and starting with a fixed idea that
the sooner he gets back to his stables the better for
his own well-being, tugs desperately at every turn-
ing in the endeavour to make a short cut home, and
if confronted in his straight course with any object
which he dislikes, wheels sharp round, and sets off
at a lively trot stable-wards. The first half-hour of
Mr. Stormont's ride is one prolonged tussle with the
gray, which, in the pride of their hearts, the joint
proprietors have christened Flying Dutchman.
'The Dutchman is awfully fresh to-day, Fred,*
remonstrates Eose, when the gray has backed into
the landau half a dozen times, in his efforts to go
up every side street or alley ; ' hadn't you better try
him on the curb ? '
'I think I am riding him on the curb,' says
Fred, looking doubtfully at his reins, which are in
an inextricable muddle, ' the fact is Jewson spoils
his mouth. Yah, you beast, what's the matter
TOWN AND COl^STY. 281
now ? ' as the Dutchman, taking ohjection to a very
small child in a white pinafore, gathers all his legs
together, collapses, and scrambles frantically across
the street, with a noise as of a detachment of
cavalry.
* Is that a fit ? ' asks Sibyl, when Mr. Trenchard's
horses have recovered from their consternation at
this manoeuvre.
* No, it's only a shy. He cannot stand a
perambulator.'
'Nor a woman in a red cloak, nor a baker's cart,
nor a washing-basket, nor a chimney sweep, nor a
heap of stones, nor an organ,' says Rose, indig-
nantly ; ' I never knew such a beast. He'll have
your life some day, Fred, I feel convinced.'
* He's more than half thoroughbred,' says Fred-
erick, leaning over to pat the animal's neck — an
attention which the Dutchman resents by a sudden
slouch forward, and a furious shake of his head,
whereby he all but precipitates Fred upon the
paving stones.
'Are you fond of riding?' asks Sibyl, as the
horseman pulls himself together, scarlet after his
232 DEAD men's shoes.
struggles with his steed, and settles into a jolting
trot beside the barouche.
*r — p — passion — ate — ly/ says Fred, the syl-
lables jerked out of him piecemeal by the gray.
' But that seems rather an uncomfortable horse
to ride.'
'He's a little fidgety in the town, but he's
splendid when you get him on the turf. You
should see him in a stretching gallop across the
grass/
Mr. Stormont omits to state that in these
stretching gallops he is entirely at the Dutchman's
mercy, and suffers abject terror.
They turn out of the Market-place presently,
into a broad lane leading to the woods — a lane
in which there are nice old houses on one side,
and orchards on the other, and at the top of this
lane they come out upon that open stretch of
greensward, with a hollow full of hazel bushes,
hawthorn, and blackberry here and there, which
is dignified with the name of Redcastle Woods.
Youder towers the stand, white in the sun-
shine, flags blue, red, and yellow, fluttering gaily.
TOWN AND COUNTY. 233
the oval course on the southern side of a slope,
and a fringe of carriages and smartly dressed people
— a simple rustic racecourse, with its local gentry,
and sprinkling of citizens from busy Krampston.
The Stormont barouche takes its position among
the great ones of the land, and by good luck finds it-
self in the very lap of the county. The magnates of
Kedcastle are six, carriages off, Mrs. Groshen becking
and nodding at her friends, gorgeously arrayed in
a brilliant mauve silk, which glistens in the sun,
and a bonnet loaded with feathers.
There are many greetings between Mrs. Stor-
mont and her neighbours — for the Stormonts occupy
the border line of Eedcastle society, and are gra-
ciously regarded by the county families. Loud ' how
d'ye do's ' are uttered by the occupants of a tall
coach next door to the barouche, two young men
and two young women are seated on the box — the
men in homespun tweed, the women in brown
holland and brown straw hats. Two grooms in
dark green, and mahogany tops, are in attendance.
•Are we going to have some good racing. Sir
Wilford ? ' asks Mrs. Stormont, radiant at finding
234 DEAD men's shoes.
herself in such good company, and Mrs. Groshen
afar off like Dives. The bigger of the gray men
answers in a loud good natured voice, dropping
lightly down from his perch, and coming close to
the barouche.
' Not much fun, I'm afraid ; wretched lot of
leather platers. Going to speculate, Miss Stormont?
Better put something on Stagheen for the Cup.
Sure to win.'
He addresses himself to the fair Eose, shaking
hands with her the while, but he looks at Sibyl.
That delicate clear-cut face, with its brown eyes, is
strange to him, and in a place where everybody knows
everybody else that is enough to awaken interest.
Sibyl remembers him as one of the hunters she
has seen ride past the walls of Lancaster Lodge,
clad in weather-stained scarlet.
He is tall — six feet two — broad shouldered, with
the frame of an athlete. He has shaggy brown hair,
shaggy brown moustache, good-humoured gray eyes,
a common-place nose, a good, firm mouth, and
strong square chin, large hands in well-worn tan
"loves.
TOWX AND COUNTY. 235
'Sir Wilford Cardonnel, Miss Fauntliorpe,' says
Mrs. Stormont, graciously.
Sir Wilford takes off his hat and looks pleased,
but is . little wiser than ^before. This name of
Faunthorpe means nothing for him.
' Fond of racing ? ' he inquires, following up the
introduction.
'This is the first time I was ever at a race/
replies Sibyl. 'But I think I shall enjoy it very
much.
*Then you don't belong to this part of the
country, I suppose ? We Yorkshire folks are
always going to races.'
'Yes, I have lived in Eedcastle ever since — or
almost ever since, I left school.'
' And have never come to the races ? '
*I couldn't get anybody to bring me/ replies
Sibyl, frankly. ' Neither of my uncles care about
races. Good gracious ! '
This exclamation is evoked by a most startling
apparition on the other side of the course, exactly
opposite the barouche. A shabby old pony carriage,
quite the most ancient vehicle of its kind in Ked-
236 DEAD men's shoes.
castle, a dilapidated, unkempt pony, with his nose
in a nose-bag, an elderly gentleman in a discoloured
white hat, a young woman in pink muslin, and a
girl of nondescript appearance, in short petticoats,
standing on the back seat of the pony carriage, in
order the better to survey the brilliant scene, and
making a positively awful exhibition of her legs.
These are uncle Eobert, Marion, and Jenny.
Sibyl beholds them with unmitigated consternation.
She will be obliged to acknowledge them presently,
to avow her relationship to that wretched chaise,
that odious pony, in the face of the county
families, nay, the highest and mightiest of the
high and mighty — the Cardonnels of the How,
people she has heard the Stormonts talk about
with as much reverence as if they had the pros-
perity of the county in their keeping, wound up
the sun like a clock, and turned on the rain
from a tap in their custody.
'This is Marion's doing,' thinks Sibyl, indig-
nantly. 'That girl is capable of anything. To
think that they must needs come and perch
themselves exactly opposite us ! '
TOWN AXD COUNTY. 237
There seems deliberate malice in the act. A
few minutes ago there was only empty space where
the pony-chaise stands now. The chaise has been
placed there since the arrival of the barouche.
Dr. Faunthorpe surveys his niece's party mildly
through his spectacles ; ]\Iarion nods and kisses her
hand ; but Sibyl, once having seen her danger, looks
every way except towards the doctor's chaise.
Jenny, more energetic than her elders, is not to be
baffled. Finding nods and hand-kissing unnoticed,
she raises her shrill young voice, and screams,
* Sibyl, Sibyl ! Look this way, Sibyl.'
' Who is that leggy child calling ? ' asks Sir
Wilford, looking at Jenny through his race-glass,
which brings her to the end of his nose. ' What an
excitable young person ! And what a funny party !
A little old man in spectacles and a white hat, a tall
young woman with ginger hair, and that leggy child
dancing about upon the cushions. And what a
pony ! The very one Xoah had in the ark, I should
think."
Sibyl grows crimson. Can she acknowledge her
kith and kin after this ? While she hesitates, ^Irs.
238 DEAD men's shoes.
Stormont raises her gold-rimmed binoculars, and
scrutinizes the opposite party.
' Why, my dear/ she exclaims, not sorry to set
off any obligation involved in the loan of the
barouche by the humiliation of its owner, ' it's that
dear, good little man, Dr. Faunthorpe, and your
sisters. I wonder you didn't recognise the pony;
there's not another like him in Kedcastle.'
' Is that little girl your sister ?' says Sir Wilford.
* I beg your pardon and hers if I said anything
impertinent. She seems a fine, high-spirited girl,
but in an awful state of excitement. Shall I bring
her across to you ? She wants to speak to you, I
fancy.'
' Oh, pray leave her where she is,' replies Sibyl.
'She's a dreadful nuisance. There, there, child,'
nodding to the obnoxious hoyden ; ' won't that do ? '
Jane kisses her hand again vehemently, and
having succeeded in attracting her sister's attention,
seems tolerably resigned.
Sibyl feels that her maize- coloured silk and India
muslin, the barouche, and all things are a failure
after this. And there are the Miss Cardonnels in
TOWN AND COUXTY. 239
their plain hoUand gowns, with satchels at their
waists, brown hats, brown feathers, brown hollaud
umbrellas — singularly plain attire, which looks in
better form for a racecourse than Sibyl's flower-show
costume.
Sir Wilford stands by the barouche for an hour
or more, and tells Sibyl all about the horses. He
devotes himself to her almost exclusively before the
face of Eedcastle. Fred Stormont, pounding rest-
lessly about upon the gray, and bringing that excited
animal to anchor beside the barouche, when he can,
feels that he is nowhere, and begins to think that he
has erred on the side of caution and hesitancy in
his wooing of Stephen Trenchard's niece.
The races may not be good races from a profes-
sional point of view, — the horses may be the very
refuse of famous stables, but the excitement and
exhilaration of the crowd are not lessened by that
fact. No weighty stakes are lost or won, but every
one seems happy. Broad grins are the only w^ear.
There is a great deal of picnicking between the
races, and people who would have lived through the
day at home on a biscuit and a glass of sherry, do
240 DEAD men's shoes.
wild things in the consumption of lobster salad,
chicken, mayonnaise, and pigeon pie.
Mrs. Stormont has provided the most refined of
baskets, — delicate papers of anchovy and chicken
sandwiches, fragile biscuits, some choice fruit, and a
bottle of dry sherry. These favours she dispenses
to her iDarty, while Sir Wilford and his people are
devouring their lobster salad on the roof of the drag,
enlivened by a running fire of champagne corks.
Fred, roving to and fro on the gray, declines the
maternal sherry.
'No thanks, mother; when I'm dry myself I
don't want my wine dry. Ill go and do a bitter at
the stand presently.'
Sibyl has gradually recovered that death-blow
of the pony carriage. Sir Wilford Cardonnel's
attentions have put her in good humour. It is as if
some prince of the blood-royal had paid her homage
in the presence of his subjects, and she knows that
Mrs. Groshen and Mrs. Marlin Spyke, the Miss
Jewsons, and above all dearest Eose and Violet, will
be provoked to envy by the distinction thus con-
ferred upon her. Indeed, dear Eose's brow has a
TO^TT AND COrXTY. 241
cloudy look already, and Violet is snappish. Only
Mrs. Stormont preserves her equanimity, and smiles
upon the baronet when he re- descends from the drag
and takes up his position again beside the barouche.
Sibyl's ignorance of racing matters is curiously
attractive to him from its novelty, his sisters being
learned in the minutest details of the turf, and as
well up in stable talk as their brother's stud groom,
under whom they have graduated. He lingers by
her side till the races are nearly over, and his
grooms go to fetch the horses. The important duty
of seeing these animals put to distracts him a little,
but he comes back again at the last to say good-bye
to ^Irs. Stormont and her daughters and to Sibyl.
' I should like you to know my sisters,' he says,
* I am sure you'd suit each other,' — a mendacious
assertion inspired by the exigencies of the situation,
Sir WiKord knowing very well that town and
county have seldom an idea in common. He has
not ventured to bring about an introduction on the
course, his sisters being at an inconvenient altitude,
and of an uncertain temper. But he feels that he
must contrive to see more of ]\Iiss Faunthorpe some-
VOL. I. B
242 DEAD men's shoes.
how or other. Who can she be ? She is too richly-
dressed for a governess, and the Stormonts are too
civil to her. Yet she must be a nobody, or Mrs.
Stormont would have taken care to parade her
people. He resolves to call on the Stormonts in a
day or two, and find out all about their protegee ;
and sustained by this resolution, he takes his
reluctant leave. How splendid his coach looks to
Sibyl ! the four broad-chested bays, with their honest
English-looking heads, horses that mean work, the
steel chains, the black harness, austerely simple in
its mounting, the grooms in Lincoln green, the two
girls in brown holland nodding good-bye to the Stor-
monts as Sir Wilford drives away, making a wide
sweep upon the turf, his horses going as if this was
the happiest moment of their lives, his grooms
climbing into their places after the team has started,
with some hazard of life and limb, but with honaur
to themselves.
' Charming man, Sir Wilford Cardonnel,' says Mrs.
Stormont. * The Cardonnels are one of the oldest of
our county families. How do you like him, Sibyl ? '
* He seems good-natured,' replies Sibyl, carelessly.
TOWX A^D COUNTY. 243
^Miat are the Cardonnels to her ? and what avails
this young man's admiration, save to flaunt in the
face of her acquaintance ? Her name is written
in the Book of Fate, and in the registers of
St. Apollonius, Pimlico.
' The soul of good nature. His sisters are
charming too ; great friends of Eose and Violet's.'
* Uncommon intimate,' says Fred, who has
dragged that unyielding gray np to the carriage once
more. * They see one another twice a year, I should
think. For my part, I detest the county people.
They're a parcel of narrow-minded snobs, who think
the beginning and end of life is to ride straight to
hounds.'
Having relieved his jealous pangs by this
vindictive burst, Fred goes to look after Mr. Tren-
chard's horses, and presently the barouche falls in
with the line of vehicles driving towards the town,
Fred and the gray in attendance, that animal
suddenly amenable to reason now that he is going
back to his stable.
Sibyl drives home with the Stormont?, with
whom she is to dine.
244 DEAD men's shoes.
*I do hope your dear uncle will join us at
dinner/ says Mrs. Stormont.
That hope is nipped in the bud, for among the
day's letters Mrs. Stormont finds a note from
Stephen Tren chard: —
'Dear Mrs. Stormont,
* I do not feel well enough to avail myself of
your] kind invitation for this evening, so must ask
you to excuse me. I will send the carriage for Sibyl
at half-past ten.
* Yours very truly,
'Stephen Trenchard.'
* I'm afraid your uncle is breaking up, my dear,'
remarks Mrs. Stormont with a sigh. 'I saw a
change in him when I called the other day.'
' That is strange,' says Sibyl, ' for he has not been
actually ill. He has not kept his room for a single
day.'
* He is a man of iron nerves, my love, and would
be reluctant to give way to illness, but I feel sure
that he is declining. At his age, and after a life in
TOWN AND COUNTY. 245
India, you cannot expect to have him with you
many years.'
Sibyl looks grave. No, she has not counted on
her uncle living many years, or at least when she
deserted her husband she told herself that the old
man's life could be but brief, and that a few years of
patience would be rewarded by fortune and inde-
pendence for all her life to come. But since she has
lived with uncle Trenchard she has been inclined to
think differently. In his wiry frame and active
habits, his temperance, his iron nerves, there seems
the promise of life prolonged to its utmost limits.
He may live to be ninety, and she be almost an old
woman ere she reap the wages of her toil ; and in
that case what is to become of Alexis ?
Mrs. Stormont's remark inspires a new hope.
The end may not be so far off after all. She is not
ungrateful to her uncle, she is not without some
kind of affection for him, but the hope of reunion
with her husband, of forgiveness and atonement, is
sweet.
CHAPTEE XVI.
A MYSTEEIOUS VISITOE.
The dinner at the Stormonts is as other dinners in
the same house. The guests are Mr. and Mrs.
Groshen, Dr. and Mrs. Mitsand, and one Miss
Mitsand, the ugliest, as Fred remarks with a sense of
injury. The flower-pots on the table, the silver
dishes, the ruby hock glasses, the finger-glasses en-
graved with the Greek key pattern, the talk, the
twaddle, Mrs. Groshen's Honiton lace, how well
Sibyl knows them all ! She breathes a sigh for the
days that are gone, before that slow, pompous
banquet is ended, and thinks that after all there was
more pleasure in a haddock and a cup of tea in
Dixon Street than in all this provincial splendour.
The talk is chiefly of the races, who was there
and who was not there. The county families are
brought on the table, and discussed fully, together
with their genealogies, which are as well known and
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 247
as complicated as if they were Greek heroes or
demigods.
Mrs. Stormont praises Sir Wilford Cardonnel,
and those dear girls his sisters, and talks of the
rose-garden and ferneries at the How ; whereby she
bears down rather heavily upon Mrs. Groshen, who
has never been bidden to that earthly paradise. Mr.
Groshen opines that Sir Wilford is better off than
most of the county people, whom he disparages as a
shabby lot, but adds that at the rate Sir Wilford is
going on wdth his drags and hunters he is likely to
outrun the constable before he is many years older.
That the evening entertainment which follows
the feast is dull, not even Mrs. Stormont's dearest
friend Mrs. Groshen could deny, were her views
taken on the subject.
Sibyl knows every piece of furniture in the
drawing-room by heart, every photograph in the
album. She knows the Miss Stormonts' favourite
fantasias better than those performers themselves,
or they would play more correctly. She knows
exactly how she will be asked to play one of her
lovely pieces, or to sing one of her sweet songs, and
248 DEAD men's shoes.
how the young ladies will pretend to delight in
Chopin, and the elders praise her wonderful
' fingering/ and how stifled yawns will at intervals
prevail among the company. She knows how Violet
will tell her about some new fern she has discovered,
'such a darling '; and how Rose will ask her if she is
gomg on the Continent this year,' and will then
favour her with some interesting facts about her
Swiss tour with papa three years ago.
What a blessed relief when the clock on the
mantelpiece strikes eleven ! Sibyl has been wonder-
ing for ever so long why her carriage has not been
announced.
* Dear Mrs. Stormont, I think they must have
forgotten me,' she says. *But we are such near
neighbours, I can walk home easily.'
*My love, it is quite early; don't talk of going ;
the carriage will come for you, I am sure. We want
another of those delicious sonatas. Not going,
surely, Mrs. Groshen,' cries Mrs. Stormont, re-
joicing in her soul to see the banker and his wife
advancing to her, stately and smiling, to tell her
that they have spent * a most enjoyable evening.'
A MYSTEKIOUS VISITOE. 249
Every one discovers that it is friglitfully late.
No one would have supposed it for an instant.
How swift are the pinions of Time when pleasure
quickens them !
IVIrs. Stormont, pressed by Sibyl, makes an
inquiry about Mr. Trenchard's carriage. It has not
come.
* We walked here,' says Mr. Groshen. 'Matilda
grumbled about her dress, but I wouldn't have my
horses harnessed again after they had come from the
racecourse, and I couldn't have them standing in
harness while she changed her dress. It is no use
having fine horses if you don't study them a little.
And we're such near neighbours. We'U take care of
you, Miss Faunthorpe, if you don't mind walking.'
*I should like it,' says Sibyl, with a longing
look at the cool purple night beyond the open
window of the gaslit room.
Fred springs up eagerly from the ottoman on
which he has been sitting in patient attendance on
the unattractive Miss Mitsand.
*Let me see you home, Miss Faunthorpe. I
shall be delighted.'
250 DEAD men's shoes.
Sibyl runs away to put on her bonnet, and tbe
guests issue forth in a bevy. Dr. Mitsand's useful
brougham is waiting, the others walk home in the
tranquil perfumed air. Fred offers his arm, which
Sibyl accepts with the infinite ease of indifference.
Mr. and Mrs. Groshen make themselves agreeable
by walking on briskly.
'Isn't it a lovely night?' gasps Fred, rapturously.
* Yes, it's very fine. We generally have nice
evenings in June.'
*Ye-es,' replies Fred, after judicious consider-
ation. ' I think we do. Nice long evenings, at any
rate. The twenty-first being the longest day, of
course, is a reason. Nice month for races, too ;
but rather rainy sometimes, don't you think ? '
Sibyl concedes the point.
'I remember one wet June — poured all the
month — regular cats and dogs. The racecourse was
a morass; of course the heaviest timbered horse
won. Here we are, I declare, close to Lancaster
Lodge ! How I wish it was further off ! '
* Not very flattering to me to wish us less near
neighbours/ says Sibyl, laughing.
A MYSTERIOUS YISITOE. 251
' Oh, come now, Miss Faunthorpe, you know I
don't mean that ; but just for to-night, for the sake
of prolonging this delightful walk.'
* Don't talk nonsense, please/ says Sibyl. ' And
be kind enough to ring the bell.'
They are standing at the gate by this time, and
Fred lingers, as if loth to perform that necessary
duty.
He rings, and the lodgekeeper opens the side
gate. Sibyl offers Mr. Stormont her hand on the
threshold, but gives him no invitation to enter the
domain.
* Good night,' she says, and then cries suddenly,
* Do you hear that ? '
It is a most melodious jng-jugging from a dark
clump of chestnuts near the gate.
*I hear something chirping,' replies Fred,
dubiously.
' It's the nightingale. It sings every night just
at tliis time. Isn't it exquisite ? '
* Ptather throaty,' says Fred.
* Good night,' repeats Sibyl, shutting the gate in
his face.
252 DEAD men's shoes.
'Horrid young man ! ' she ejaculates.
How dark, and cool, and silent, save for those
nightingales, the grounds are to-night ! She is in no
hurry to go into the house. The dewy turf, the tall
black trees standing out against a sky of mixed light
and colour, the moon rising grandly above the elms
yonder, just where the Lancaster Lodge grounds
meet the edge of Redcastle Park, Sir John Boldero's
domain — all is beautiful,
Sibyl walks slowly along the shrubberied drive,
and round to the lawn behind the house, that wide
sweep of velvet grass upon which she and her uncle
spend the summer afternoons. Mr. Trenchard's
study is on this side of the house. The lighted
windows inform Sibyl that he has not yet retired for
the night.
The study opens on the lawn by a half-glass
door. She can go into the house this way, and
surprise her forgetful uncle by her return, and tell
him all about her day, about Sir Wilford Cardonnel's
attentions, of which she is proud. She thinks it
will please her uncle to know that one of the
magnates of the land has admired her.
A MYSTEKIOUS VISITOR. 253
She goes towards this glass door, but makes a
dead stop before one of the study windows, startled
by what she sees there. It is nothing very remark-
able, perhaps, at the first showing, only uncle
Stephen and a stranger; but the stranger is no
ordinaiy person, and there is that in Stephen
Trenchard's face which makes the scene remarkable.
The lamp burns brightly on the of&cial-looking
table, which is spread with papers — formidable-
looking papers, bristling with figures, ruled with red
ink. They are laid open, as if for inspection, and
among them lies an open ledger.
Sibyl has no experience which can teach her the
exact nature of these papers, but she knows instinc-
tively that they must have some relation to
commerce.
Stephen Trenchard's face is black as thunder.
His left hand lies on that open ledger ; with the
right he points to a column of figures, running his
square forefinger down the column with a vicious
dig of the nail here and there, as much as to say,
* Look at that, sir, and at that ! ' and * What do you
say to that ? '
254 DEAD MEN'S SHOES.
The stranger stands at Mr. Trenchard's elbow.
He is a foreigner — an Oriental — Sibyl thinks,
though his plain and faultless clothes are perfectly
English. He has a dark olive skin, eyes black as
night, an aquiline nose, a narrow oval face, and silky
blue-black hair. He is something less than middle
height, stout, and sleek. His lips move softly, and
his plump yellow hand seems to expostulate as
Stephen Trenchard scowls at the figures.
* Who can he be ? ' wonders Sibyl, abandoning
all intention of seeing her uncle to-night. *Some
Indian friend of uncle Stephen's, I suppose. But
what can all those papers mean, and why does uncle
Stephen look so angry ? He looked just like that
when he spoke of Philip Secretan.'
She goes round to the front of the house. The
hall door is open, and the footman is airing himself
on the threshold, listening to the nightingales.
* Why wasn't the carriage sent for me ? ' asks
Sibyl.
* Indeed, ma'am, I don't know. Was it ^ordered ? '
' I suppose so. Mr. Trenchard said he would
send it.'
A MYSTERIOUS YISITOR. 55
'I'm afraid master must have forgotten,
ma'am. I didn't take no message to the coachman.
Perhaps it was the gentleman coming to see him
that put it out of his mind.'
'I suppose so. Who is the gentleman? Do
you know ? '
' No, ma'am, there was no name given. The
gentleman came after dinner, about nine o'clock.
He came from London, I believe. The London
train hadn't been long in when he came, and he's
been with Mr. Trenchard ever since.'
*Is he going to stay here to-night?'
'I don't know, ma'am. There's been nothing
said, but Mrs. Skinner had the Blue Eoom got
ready in case it should be wanted, as a premonitory
measure.'
Sibyl yawns languidly, and goes upstairs to her
own room, puzzled, but not seriously disturbed. This
stranger has come on some business errand evidently.
She knows that her uncle's temper is not par-
ticularly placid, and concludes that he has been
irritated by some vexation of a commercial character.
Yet she cannot understand how this can be, since
256 DEAD men's shoes.
she has been taught to believe that Mr. Trenchard
has retired from business.
Curiosity would impel her to await the stranger's
departure in the drawing-room, or to discover
whether he is to remain for the night ; but she does
not care to encounter her uncle in his present
temper, and he would doubtless be offended by
anything that could look like espionage.
It is nearly midnight when she goes to her
room. Her windows open on the garden, and are
above those of the study. She seats herself by an
open window, and looks out into the cool, shadowy
garden. Presently she hears a voice raised in anger,
her uncle's voice, she knows ; but the stranger's
tones never reach her ear.
' His voice is like his looks, I dare say,' she
thinks, ' soft, and silky, and cunning. I shouldn't
think he was the kind of man uncle Trenchard
would trust.'
She wastes more than an hour in undressing,
brushing her hair, putting away her finery. The
clocks strike one, but those lighted windows still
shine upon the dark turf below.
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 257
* What a long interview ! ' she thinks. ' This
Indian gentleman must surely be going to stay all
night. He would never leave the house at such an
hour as this.'
She falls asleep at last, worn out by the fatigues
of the day, but at the last moment hears that angry
voice of her uncle's suddenly raised in a gust of
passion.
She wakes next morning with an uneasy sense
of somethinc^ havinq- aone wrongj • but it is some
moments before that scene in the room beneath
flashes back upon her.
' Who can that man be ? ' she asks herself again,
' and why was uncle Trenchard so angry ? Some
Indian merchant, perhaps, to whom he has lent
money. The loss of a few thousands ought not to
make him so angry. It must be like a drop in the
ocean compared with his immense wealtL But
then I know he is fond of money, and that it pains
him to part even with a ten-pound note.'
She dresses, and goes down to the dining-room,
looking as fresh as the newly opened roses, to which
the nightingale sings at sundown. Mr. Trenchard is
VOL. I. s
258 DEAD men's shoes.
in his accustomed seat, the big crimson morocco
arm-chair drawn into the bay-window. The sashes
are up, and the sweet morning air comes in across
the flower-beds. Eight o'clock is the hour for
breakfast, winter and summer, at Lancaster Lodge,
and unpunctuality is little less than a crime in the
eyes of Stephen Trenchard, who is usually dressed
in his blue frock coat and nankeen waistcoat and
trousers by six, and prowling about the grounds to
the discomfiture of his gardeners.
He is a shade paler than usual, and has purple
shadows under his eyes. His hand shakes a little,
Sibyl thinks, as he turns the leaves of the Man-
chester daily, which he reads every morning before
breakfast. The face he turns to her as she bends
over him to administer her morning kiss has an
old and wan look in the sunshine. Can it be that
Mrs. Stormont is right, and that Stephen Trenchard
is breaking up ? '
There are no early prayers at Lancaster Lodge.
Mr. Trenchard has his ideas upon religion, and his
own particular creed by which he is to stand or fall,
no doubt ; but whatever these are, he keeps them
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 259
strictly to himself. He never goes to church, a
neglect of duty which in a person of Mr. Trenchard's
consequence Redcastle regards as an eccentricity,
but which would make a social outlaw of a small
butcher or baker. He has no objection to Sibyl's
attendance at the minster, where she exhibits the
latest fashions on Sunday mornings. He is no
declared infidel. He simply ignores religion, as a
thing he has been able to dispense with all his life.
Sibyl takes her place before the silver urn, and
begins the business of tea-making. Mr. Trenchard
drinks green tea unmixed with black, and is very
particular about the preparation of the beverage.
Marion has never succeeded in pleasing him in this
matter. Sibyl has never failed.
* You are looking so tired this morning, dear
uncle ! ' she says, in her soft winning voice. ' You
were up very late last night, were you not ? '
* How do you know that ? You were in bed, I
suppose ? '
' Not till twelve o'clock. I stayed rather late at
the Stormonts, thinking you would send the carriage
for me.'
260 DEAD men's shoes.
' The carriage ? ah, to be sure. I forgot.'
' It didn't matter in the least. I walked home.
That horrid Fred brought me. Such a lovely night,
the walk would have been delightful with any one
else.'
* Ah, you don't like young Stormont ? ' says Mr.
Trenchard, looking sharply at her. ' I'm glad of it,
child. He's a genteel pauper at best. You must
marry some one better than that.'
Sibyl pales at the mention of marriage.
' I don't mean to marry at all, uncle. I'm much
happier as I am, with you.'
' Stuff and nonsense, my dear ! Marriage is a
woman's mission, and with your pretty face you are
sure to get a rich husband.'
' You wouldn't have me marry for money, uncle
Trenchard ! ' cries Sibyl, with a horrified look.
Here is this old man, rolling in wealth, and yet
counselling a mercenary marriage.
' I wouldn't ^^have you marry without money.
You are no girl to play at love in a cottage. That's
a game you'd soon grow tired of
Sibyl starts as if she had been stung.
A MYSTERIOUS VTSITOE. 261
' Don't talk of marriage, uncle Trenchard. The
subject is hateful to me. There is no one in Eed-
castle that I care for, or am ever likely to care for.'
' I am sorry to hear it,' replies Mr. Trenchard,
with a moody look, as he resumes his newspaper.
Stephen Trenchard is not a man who riots in
the 2ood things of this life. His breakfast consists
of a cup of green tea and a little bit of dry toast.
His other meals are of the simplest. But there is
considerable epicureanism in his simplicity, and he
resents a bad dinner as a personal injury.
' I expected to find a visitor here this morning,'
Sibyl says presently, too curious to be silent on the
subject of that nocturnal interview in Mr. Trench-
ard's study.
' Indeed ! Have you invited any one ? '
' I should not take such a liberty without your
permission — unless it were Marion or Jenny. I
thought the gentleman who was with you last
night would stay .'
Her uncle looks at her with a darker frown
than she has ever provoked before.
*The gentleman came on business, and left as
262 DEAD men's shoes.
soon as his business was concluded/ replies Mr.
Trenchard, in chilling tones. ' The less you trouble
yourself about my affairs, Sibyl, the better for our
mutual happiness.'
* I only wondered ' falters Sibyl.
' Don't wonder. It's a most unprofitable occupa-
tion of the mind. Who told you there was any one
with me last night?'
' I saw him.'
'Saw him? How?'
' The night was so lovely, that I walked round
the garden after Fred Stormont left me at the gate,
and I was coming in at your study door, seeing
your lamp burning, when I saw that you were not
alone.'
' The gentleman you saw is a Calcutta merchant,
an old acquaintance, who wanted my advice in a
critical turn of his affairs. And now you know all
that there is to be known, and may leave off won-
dering.'
Mr. Trenchard sips his tea and nibbles his dry
toast in silence, and presently disappears altogether
behind the county pa er.
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 268
Sibyl is disappointed. She expected to be
questioned about yesterday, to be asked if she had
made any conquests, to be able to describe Sir
Wilford Cardonnel's obvious subjugation, and the
effect which it produced on the Stormonts, — Rose's
envious looks, Violet's constrained civility, Fred's
anffuish of mind as he curveted on the unmauafje-
able gray.
Finding her uncle indisposed for conversation,
Sibyl leaves the dining-room as soon as decency
permits, and flits away to her favourite retreat — the
garden. Life which is all a summer holiday is
pleasant enough, doubtless ; but oh, how monoto-
nous ! and, in Sibyl's case, how lonely !
This morning, exhausted with yesterday's excite-
ment, she throws herself back in her low wicker
chair wearily, and sighs two or three times in a
quarter of an hour without knowing why, — sighs
for the days that are gone — for poverty and Alexis,
perhaps, though she would hardly confess as much.
The roses glorify the garden, the trees cast
their deep cool shadows on the sunny grass ; the
house yonder, with all its windows shining in the
264 DEAD men's shoes.
sun, its Venetians, its flower-boxes, its prosperous
air, as of a habitation for which wealth has done
its uttermost, — all these things remind her that her
lot has fallen in a pleasant place. Yet she yearns
for something more.
How soon will it come ? How soon will the
heritage for which she waits be hers ? Mrs. Stor-
mont has noticed a change in Stephen Trenchard,
and that change has been very obvious to Sibyl's
eyes this morning.
She struggles against sordid, mercenary thoughts,
but they are too strong for her. She cannot help
speculating about the future which seems drawing
nearer, that future which is to reunite her to Alexis
— to open the door of a new glad world, to release
her from this dull bondage in the narrow paths of
provincial pretence and respectability.
She knows that she is her uncle's favourite niece.
Marion is suffered to come and go, but is rarely
favoured with so much as a civil vrord or a kindly
glance from Mr. Trenchard. Jenny he openly
abominates. Her noisy bouncing ways distress him
beyond measure, and she is rarely admitted to his
A MYSTERIOUS HSITOE. 265
presence. Sibyl therefore concludes that — although
Mr. Trenchard, out of kindly feeling, may leave a
few thousands to Marion and Jenny, just enough to
secure them a competence — the bulk of his fortune
will be hers. That vast wealth which has made
Eedcastle bow down before him will be hers ; and
Eedcastle, which already fawns upon her — honour-
ing her prospective riches — will fall prostrate and
worship her.
* Poor uncle Trenchard,' she thinks, compas-
sionately. ' ^Yhat is the good of money to the old ?
His prosperity comes at the w^^ong end of life.
What can his wealth give him ? A fine house,
where he lives alone, a splendid solitude. Horses
which he rarely uses. For all the personal gratifi-
cation he has out of his wealth he would be as well
off with six hundred a year. But he has the
homage of Eedcastle, which would not be given to
a man of limited income, even though he devoted
half his revenue to acts of charity '
Sibyl sees the end of her bondage coming near,
and thinks of Alexis with tender loDdno- for re-
o o
union. Will he come back to her ? Will he
266 DEAD men's shoes.
forgive her ? Yes, a thousand times yes. He loves
her too well to be obdurate. Whatever anger he
may have felt at her a^bandonment of him will
melt away before her smiles.
It is a trial to be so ignorant of his fate, not
to know where he is or what he is doing, whether
fortune has been kind or cruel to him.
Great heaven ! if he should be dead ! If the
fight should have been too hard, and he fallen !
Her heart grows cold at the mere thought that
such a thing is possible. She shudders, clasps her
hands over her eyes as if to shut out the horrid
spectacle. If he were dead; hope's airy palace
built on a fatal quicksand ; and the future she has
looked forward to a future never to be realized !
No, she will not think of anything so hideous.
Tate must be kind to true love, and she has loved her
husband truly, even when deserting him to secure
fortune. She remembers how often she has heard
him say that it is easy for a single man to fight
the battle of life, that alone he could have struggled
on somehow, could have obtained employment,
could have roamed the world till he found just
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 267
the one spot where he could prosper. He has never
said it reproachfully. He was too fond of her for
that. But he has said it ; and the memory of that
speech is a consoling thought to Sibyl just now.
* He has emigrated, I dare say,' she thinks. ' He
had a longing to try his luck in Australia. He is on
the other side of the world, most likely, and when I
am free to call him back to me, I shall have to wait
ever so lono; before he can come.'
She is aroused from this reverie, from the deepest
deep of thought, by the mellifluous soprano of Mrs.
Stormont, raised inquiringly — that society voice in
which a comedy actress makes some trivial inquiry
at the wing before she appears on the stage.
' In the garden ? ' screams Mrs. Stormont. ' Dear
child ! I will find her.'
Mrs. Stormont emerges from the shrubbery,
rustling in a flounced cambric morning dress. She
wears a black lace shawl, her last summer's bonnet
' done up ' inexpensively by her maid, and in honest
truth has been * up tuwn ' to pay her tradesmen's
weekly accounts. The Stormonts, though near, are
good pay.
268 DEAD men's shoes.
'Old Mother Stormont will haggle about the
bone in a bit of brisket, and she will worry about
her Sunday sirloin/ says Mr, Heffer, the butcher,
'but she do pay uncommon reglar, I will say that
for the old gal/
Familiarity, induced by Mrs. Stormont's frequent
personal visits of complaint or inspection at Mr.
Heffer's shop, has bred contempt in that citizen's
mind. The customers he respects are those who
never cross his threshold or weigh his meat.
Mrs. Stormont is followed by a tall stranger in
gray, who looks about him admiringly, and whom
Sibyl hardly recognises at the first glance.
'Charming place — kept so well, too — garden
much neater than my fellows keep the How. How-
d'ye-do, Miss Faunthorpe ? Hope you weren't tired
by the races yesterday.'
Sibyl blushes becomingly, startled by this sudden
appearance of the mighty Sir Wilford Cardonnel —
startled out of all sad thoughts, and gratified by this
proof of her power.
' I met this tiresome Sir Wilford in the market-
place, Sibyl,' says Mrs. Stormont with juvenile play-
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. 269
fulness — which sits upon her portly middle age
about as becomingly as the airy gauze bonnet on
her pepper-and-salt chignon, — ' and he insisted upon
my bringing him to call on you. I hope you are
not shocked with us for invadinc{ vou at such a
barbarous hour.'
Sibyl Assures Mrs. Stormont that the hour is a
matter of no importance.
* You are just as glad to see us as if we had come
in proper visiting hours,' exclaims the lady. ' What
a dear candid child she is ! I don't know what
you did with my poor Fred last night, Sibyl, but you
sent him home quite low-spirited.'
This is said with meaningr, and Sir Wilford looks
at the speaker curiously.
' Poor Fred,' he cries in his loud voice, " I think
it mi^st have been the bumping he got on that bony
gray that made him low-spirited.'
' I'm afraid I said good night rather abruptly,'
says Sibyl, ' which was very ungrateful of me after
his kindness in seeing me home. But I was vexed
with him for not appreciating our nightingales.'
' Not appreciate the nightingales ! How odd ! '
270 DEAD men's shoes.
exclaims Mrs. Stormont. ' Fred has sucli an ear for
music.''
' Shouldn't have thought it from his trotting/
remarks the candid Sir Wilford. ' Man with a good
ear always keeps time in the saddle. So you've
nightingales here, Miss Faunthorpe ? Shouldn't
have thought it, so near the town. We've no end
of 'em at the How. Jug-jug-jug from sundown till
midnight. I should like to show you our gardens
at the How, by the by. Mrs. Stormont might drive
you over some day.'
Mrs. Stormont, divided between her desire to be
intimate with the best of the county families, and
her maternal solicitude for Fred, whose interests are
evidently in peril, can only smile blandly and assent-
ingly. To drive over to the How in a friendly way
is to take the highest rank in Eedcastle society.
Mrs. Groshen will feel absolutely crushed when she
is told of such a visit. And after all, poor Fred's
courtship hangs on hand dismally, and may never
come to anything. Sibyl, although courted by the
whole family, has given no token of preference for
the eldest hope. Sibyl with Stephen Trenchard's
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOE. 271
foiiiune, and exalted into Lady Cardonnel, would be
a splendid person to know. The dear girls, Eose
and Violet, would be asked to stay at the How, no
doubt; might make splendid matches, marry into
the county.
The conversation meanders on in the same
elevated strain for half an hour while Sibyl and her
visitors walk round the crarden, Sir Wilford admirinij
everything ' monstrously,' to use his own phrase, and
grumbling a good deal about those 'fellows' of his
at the How.
' I never saw such flower-beds,' he says ; ' there's
not a dead leaf among 'em.'
' My uncle is very particular about the garden,'
says Sibyl.
* That reminds me that I must ask to be intro-
duced to your uncle.'
' I dare say he is in his study,' replies Sibyl.
' I'll run and see.'
She has an idea that it would hardly do to take
Sir Wilford to her uncle without some note of
preparation, Mr. Trenchard being somewhat out of
sorts to-day.
272 DEAD men's shoes.
She is saved the trouble of going to the study,
however, for Stephen Trenchard is seen coming
across the lawn in his Panama hat, and they all
three 2:0 to meet him. He receives Mrs. Stormont
and Sir Wilford graciously, and, the luncheon bell
ringing while he is conversing with them, insists
upon their staying to luncheon. So they all go to-
gether to the dining-room, Mrs. Stormont protesting
that her absence will be the cause of consternation
at home.
Sibyl is fluttered and a little pleased at the idea
of having made such an important conquest, — a
useless triumph, of course, for a woman in her
position, but one that flatters womanly vanity.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE wanderer's RETURN.
The great city lies seething like some uuholy
caldron under the blazing August sun, when a
lonely wayfarer returns to it after two years' exile
on the other side of the world. Rank and fashion*
middle-class wealth, professional respectability, have
deserted the airy western squares and streets for
English watering-places, Welsh mountains, Scottish
moors, Irish lakes, or broiling Continental espla-
nades, spas, conversation-houses, Rhine steamers, and
so on ; but from this eastern end of the city there
is no such exodus; here life holds on patiently
through the dog days, here labour knows no
respite, and the grinding of the universal mill
slackens not.
Alexis Secretan, just disembarked from the
famous clipper ship Oronoko, surveys the ding}'-
street, the driving crowd, with wonder, not unmin-
VOL. I. T
274 DEAD men's shoes.
gled with loathing. What a weary city it seems to
this man, who walked its stony ways two years ago
a seeker for bread, and for the most part found only
the natural product of the soil — a stone ! He has
found fortune kinder at tlie antipodes, man more
friendly, Nature more liberal of her smiles, less shut
out and constrained by brick and mortar. He has
achieved no sudden prosperity, he has worked hard
and honestly, and has done well ; so well as to be
able to come back to this sophisticated, unfriendly
city, whither fate draws him as a magnet.
It is not possible for a man to feel more lonely
than this returning wayfarer. In all the vast city
which spreads itself about and around him there
lives only one person from whom he can hope for
a friendly smile of welcome. His humble friend
Dick Plowden is the only being to whom he can
go with any certaintj" of not being considered a
bore and an intruder. His old brother officers
— the companions of his brief day of prosperity, —
alas ! he wore out the friendship of those when he
sank to that lowest grade in the animal creation
— the borrowing animal.
THE waxderer's eeturx. 275
Dear old Dick ! honest, friendly Dick, to
whom he has long since repaid that ten-pound
note borrowed for the false wife who ^deserted
him — it is to Dick he goes naturally to-day, as
brother goes to brother. It is to Dick's recom-
mendation to Messrs. Keel and Skrew he owes
the honourable independence of the last two
years. But for Dick's influence he would never
have got that fair start in a new world which has
enabled him to keep his head above water, and
do Messrs. Keel and Skrew honourable service
on the other side of the globe.
He can afford to take a hansom, and drive
down to the Brompton Eoad as fast as a broken-
down thorough-bred can take him. Dear old Dick
is in the little back parlour hard at work, as ou
that snowy day when desperation guided Alexis to
that last resource of the desperate — the humble
friend of better days. But Dick is not occupied
to-day in the mechanical drudgery of map-painting ;
he is writing a book, a little book on astronomy,
for the use of schools, — that elementary geograph\-
of his having been a success.
276 DEAD men's shoes.
He starts up at sight of Alexis, who has pushed
by the maid -of- all- work and entered unannounced.
The two men greet each other heartily.
' Captain Secretan ! What a delightful surprise I
and looking so well too, so handsome, just like
my original captain, who took mother's first floor.'
' Dear old Dick ! '
'But I did not expect you home for ever so
long. I thought you were going to stop at Sidney,
working for the firm until you had made your
fortune.'
* Fortune is all very well, Dick — and the firm
is all very well. They have been liberal employers,
and I have worked honestly for them, and been
luclcy in my dealings for them. But the soul
of man needs something more than fifteen per cent,
commission upon all his dealings. There was an
emptiness in my heart, Dick, out yonder — a cavity
that needed filling somehow, — so I took the first
opportunity to slip across to the old world, though
God knows there's little chance of filling the
vacuum here. However, I shall only stop a month
or so, and then go back again. The firm has been
THE wanderer's returx. 277
very kind about the matter. I told them my
health was failing, and that the voyage home was
my only hope of getting strong again, so they gave
me a free passage both ways, and I'm to hold counsel
with them about the opening of a new branch of
the business out yonder.'
' And were you really ill ? ' asks Eichard
Plowden, sympathetically.
'What I told the firm was not much more than
the truth, old fellow. When heart-sickness sets in,
bodily sickness is pretty sure to follow. My nights
were growing sleepless, full of bad thoughts. Well,
Dick, you can guess my first question. Any news
—of her ? '
Eichard Plowden shakes his head despondingly.
' I am the last to hear of her,' he says, — ' I who
live as much out of the world as if I were a hermit
in a cave.'
* She might have come to you to inquire about
my fate, knowing you were the only friend
adversity had left me.'
'She has never come.'
' Nor written ? '
278 DEAD men's shoes.
'Not a line. Forgive me if I wound you,
Captain Secretan .'
'Call me Alex, Dick, or we shall quarrel.'
'Eorgive me if I seem to speak hardly of her,
but upon my honour, Alex, it seems to me that
you have nothing to do but to forget her. She
deserted you when you had the most need of her
love, when, if she had been a true vv^oman, she
would have clung to you most fondly.'
* Granted, Dick. She was selfish, base, cowardly.
"We had sunk together into the slough of despond,
and she contrived to scramble out of it and leave
me in the mire. She was clever enough to make
use of me to accomplish her escape, sent me out
among hard-hearted humanity to borrow, beg, or
steal the means by which she meant to separate
herself from my fallen fortunes. Do you think I
came across the world to seek, for her ? 'No, Dick,
I am not such a fool. I have been cheated once.
I shall never be her dupe again. Do you think
I could ever trust her any more ? — that if fortune
smiled upon us, and she pretended to love me,
I could feel any confidence in her truth, any
THE wanderer's returx. 279
security in her iiffection ? The void in my lieart
is to be filled, but not by her. I came back to
the old world to look for my child, — the child
that was to be born to me when my cruel wife
left me.'
* You do not even know that the child survived
its birth ? '
'What a Job's comforter you are, Dick ! I
know nothing except that I am going to hunt
for the mother in order that I may iind the
child.'
'The law would give the custody of so young
a child to the mother.'
'I snap my fingers at the law. Truth is great
and shall prevail. So base a wife must be an
unworthy mother. I will find her price for the
child. She will sell that as she sold me — for a
mess of pottage. When I left England I was
desperate — mad, perhaps, or I should not have left
the land that held my child. My loneliness in that
strange world yonder awakened a father's feelings,
I found out how dreary a prospect life is to a
man who stands alone — a blank and barren desert.
280 DEAD men's shoes.
with no green oasis — no distant city to which he
may direct his steps — a lonely pilgrimage leading
nowhere.'
* How shall you commence your search ? '
' I have thought of that question many a time
on board the Oronoko. There is little choice of
plan left open to me. You remember that before
Messrs. Keel and Skrew took me into their employ-
ment, I went to Eedcastle, the place my wife came
from when she came to London as Mrs. Hazleton's
governess. I saw Sibyl's younger sister, made my
inquiries, and found that Sibyl had not been heard
of at Eedcastle. She had not gone straight home
to her uncle, the parish doctor, as I had supposed
it probable she would, and flung herself and her
troubles upon his shoulders. No, she was too artful
for that. She had some deeper game in view —
some rich relative from whom she had expectations,
as I gathered dimly from her letter. I could find
out nothing more from the girl than that Sibyl
was supposed still to be in Mrs. Hazleton's employ-
ment — that her marriage was not known to her
family, that she had not reappeared at Eedcastle, or
THE wanderer's RETURN. 281
received any help from her uncle the doctor.
Where could she be, and how could she be living ?
She must have found the wealthy friend whose
existence I inferred from her letter, and this wealthy
friend or relative was evidently not an inhabitant of
Eedcastle. She must have found a safe haven
somewhere. I made no further attempt to trace
her. I was too deeply stung by her abandonment.
" Let her go," I said to myself, as I crawled wearily
away from that dismal country town, through the
January weather, " she and I have done with each
other." I did not foresee that the hour would
come in which the thought of my child would
be more precious to me than my false wife's love
had ever been. But in my lonely days in a
strange land — lonely in spite of what the world
calls friendship — I have suffered my hopes to build
themselves round that one image — the child whose
face I have never seen. Xow, Dick, there seem
to be only two sources of information open to me.
I can go down to Eedcastle again, and renew my
inquiries at Dr. Faunthorpe's ; or, before doing
that, I can hunt up an honest creature who used
282 DEAD men's shoes.
to be housemaid at Mrs. Hazleton's, and who
made herself useful to my wife in sending her
letters, and so helping her to sustain the falsehood
which she chose to practise upon her uncle, for
quite inadequate reasons, as they always seemed
to me. But there are minds to which double-
dealing is an absolute pleasure, and hers may be
of that order,' adds Alexis, bitterly.
'You have not dined,' says Eichard Plowden,
by way of changing the conversation. ' I'll order
a steak and potatoes. You'll enjoy an English
rumpsteak after ship fare, and you know mother's
a first-rate cook. You'll take up your quarters
with us, of course, while you are in London ? '
'I shall go to Eedcastle to-morrow, Dick, if
I can find Jane Dimond, the housemaid, this
evening. But if you can give me a bed for to-night,
I will accept it with all gratitude. Don't trouble
about dinner. I had a substantial lunch on board
the Oronoko. I'll go to Lowther Street at once,
and we can smoke our pipes together when I
come back, and talk over old times, when I was
a careless, thriftless bachelor. How selfish I am,
THE waxderek's ueturx. 283
talkini? of mv own affairs all this time, and never
so much as congratulating you on your success as
an author!'
* Don't call me an author,' protests Dick,
blushing. 'That's putting me too much upon a
level with Scott and Bulwer, and geniuses of that
kind. I was lucky enough to hit upon an easy,
simple way of stating hard facts — making informa-
tion a little more attractive than it has been made
for young minds, and the style took with the
schools and teachers. My little handbook of
geography has gone through fifteen editions, and
has been quite a fortune to me, and I'm now
doing the sixth in a series of handbooks, all more
or less geographical, up to the present one, in
which I venture upon astronomy. So you see
map-painting led to something, after all.'
* Intelligence and industry always lead to some-
thing, Dick. There would be a screw loose in the
scheme of the universe if they could ever lead
to nothing.'
' Those little books have done wonders for us,'
exclaims Dick, with harmless pride. * Mother
284 DEAD men's shoes.
doesn't work half so hard as she used, though she
will stick to the cooking ; and she has a silk
gown to wear on Sundays, — doesn't it rustle, too !
you can hear it at the very top of the staircase,
— none of your soft silks for mother, but a silk
that stands alone and lets you know that it's
there. And I've got a garden. See ! '
The Duke of Devonshire could feel no loftier
pride in the possession of Chatsworth than swells
Eichard Plowden's breast to-day, as he draws up
the Venetian blind and allows his cherished garden
to burst upon Alexis Secretan's admiring gaze.
It is a quadrangle of fifteen feet square, shut in
by whitewashed walls, overshadowed by leaden
cisterns, bounded by the slated roofs of a mews,
but Dick has built rockeries in the corners,
rockeries where ferns flourish greenly. He has
trained ivy over one wall — that blessed parasite
which is so fair and quick.growing a screen for
brick and mortar abominations — Virginia creeper
over another. The grass is soft and green, and in
the middle of the little plot there is a stone
basin — a timeworn old basin which Dick has
THE waxdekee's eetuen. 285
picked up for half a sovereign in a builder's yard,
but a basin in which a slender jet of water
actually plays. Scarlet geraniums in green tubs
give colour to the picture ; an old stone bench,
also a bargain of Dick's, offers repose to the idler
in this narrow pleasaunce. Shut in as it is by
mews and back kitchens, — overshadowed as it is
by cisterns, — Eichard Plowden's garden is abso-
lutely pretty. Alexis accords it his unmeasured
approbation.
* It's the first English garden I've seen for the
last two years, Dick, and it smiles at me like a
welcome home. Yes, I'll come back in time to
smoke a cigar on that stone bench of yours under
the summer stars.'
*^\'e drink tea out there on fine Simday after-
noons in the warm weather,' says Dick, smiling
at the ferns and rockwork, ' and you can't imagine
how proud mother is. I've got the real Osmuiida
regalis, or flowering fern, in that corner, though
you'd hardly believe it ; and there's a Polypodiitm
over there that a friendly lodger of ours brought
me from Ilfracombe.'
286 DEAD men's shoes.
'Well, Dick, I must go and look for Jane
Dimond, but I'll be back in a couple of hours
at latest.'
Dick limps to tlie door with his friend, and
follows his figure with admiring eyes till it vanishes
in the current of wayfarers.
' What a fine fellow he is ! and to think that
a wife could desert him ! I'll ask mother to get
a bit of something nice for supper, a veal cutlet
and a few peas, or a chicken and a slice of broiled
ham.'
CHAPTER XVIII.
AT arm's length.
There are some people whose houses never change ;
people whose habitations are in a manner symbolical
of their lives, and whose even tenor of existence
nothing less than the undertaker can overthrow.
Mrs. Hazleton is one of these eminently respectable
personages. She has occupied the house in Lowther
Street for the last ten years. She has gone to
the sea-side every year of those ten, and at exactly
the same period, has returned after the same
interval, has given her great parties at the same
seasons, and has lived a methodical and prosperous
existence, with satisfaction to herself and her neigh-
bours, and with considerable profit to the surround-
ing shopkeepers. When the London season is over,
Mrs. Hazleton goes to the sea-side, not because she
belongs to that flight of fashionable swallows who
follow pleasure's summer from clime to clime, but
288 DEAD men's shoes.
simply because London in August is unendurable, —
baking pavements, scorched verdure, dust and grime
on everything, and a sense of desertion in all those
regions which the upper ten thousand and a con-
siderable portion of the lower million inhabit.
There could not be a better time for Alexis
to make his inquiry without having to present
himself in a formal manner to his old acquaintance.
Mrs. Hazleton is at Scarborouo^h, with children,
governess, and femme de ckamhre. The blinds are
all down, save one of the Venetians in the dining-
room, which is drawn up about halfway, and in the
space thus exposed to view the comfortable round
face of Mrs. Hazleton's cook, and the lanky coun-
tenance of Mrs. Hazleton's sandy-haired footman —
a footman whose visage is happily unfamiliar to
Alexis — exhibit themselves. Cook and footman
are en^Tasjed in looking out of the window. There
is not much for them to see in Lowther Street on
this August evening, but it is a relief to be above
ground for a little while, after the twilight of those
underground dungeons to which the London do-
mestic is confined.
AT arm's length. 289
Alexis mounts the steps, and knocks and rings,
under the calm survey of those two pair of eyes.
The sandy-haired footman is not impressed by
Mr. Secretan's appearance. Alexis is carelessly
dressed in garments of a colonial cut, a velveteen
shooting jacket, a soft felt hat, clothes chosen for
ease and hard wear rather than for fashion. The
footman yawns audibly, and when reminded of his
duties by a nudge from cook's plump elbow, mutters
contemptuously, ' Oh, hang it ! that fellow can wait,
you know ; ' and then withdraws himself lazily from
his post of observation, and anon opens the street
door a little way, filHng the opening with his person.
'Is there a young woman called Dimond in
service here now ? ' asks Alexis.
* Dun know, I'm shaw,' replies the flunkey, with
another yawn. ' What do you want with her ? '
* We won't go into particulars till you find
out whether she's still here,' answers Alexis, cooUy.
* Perhaps you wiU condescend so far as to inquire of
your feUow-servant ? '
'Hi, cooky/ bawls the footman, 'what's our
Jane's name? Dimond, ain't it?'
VOL. 1, u
290 DEAD men's shoes.
*0f course it is. You might have known/
answers cook, who has come into the hall, and now
contemplates Alexis over the youth's shoulder.
* What do you want with Jane Dimond ? ' she in-
quires, sharply. * There's no followers allowed here.'
' I'm not a follower,' answers Alexis, ' but I want
to see Jane Dimond alone for five minutes, on
business.'
The countenances of cook and footman plainly
express an apprehension that this is the begin-
ning of a deep-laid scheme against the family plate.
' I'll teU you what, young man,' says the cook,
with asperity, * my missus is out of town, and we
don't want no airy sneaks loafing about while
she's away.'
* And it ain't no good for them to loaf,' adds
the sandy-haired young man, who has not shaved
for the last day or two, and whose chin is adorned
with a tawny stubble like a newly- cut wheat
field. 'The plate has all been sent to the bank.'
Alexis fairly bursts out laughing.
' Is there so much difference between a chimney-
pot Imt and a wide awake ? between Poole and
AT arm's length. 291
a colonial tailor ? ' he says to himself, and then
he adds aloud. 'If one of you simpletons will
take the trouble to call Jane Dimond, she will
be able to tell you that I'm a gentleman, and
that I have not come after the tea-spoons or the
umbrellas. I'll wait in the street for her. You
can tell her that a gentleman from Australia
wants a few words with her.'
Cook and footman whisper doubtfully for half a
minute, and then shut the door upon Mr. Secretan,
leaving him to infer their acquiescence with his
request.
He paces the pavement for five minutes or so,
and then the good-natured Jane Dimond comes
down the steps, while cook and footman stand in
the doorway to watch the proceedings.
They see Jane gesticulate as in extreme surprise
at sight of Alexis, and then the two walk a little
further off, quite out of earshot, to the aggravation
of Jane's feUow-servants, whose curiosity is by this
time raised to the highest pitch.
* I shouldn't wonder if he was some h aristocratic
arf-brother of ers,' says cook, who is a devoted
292 DEAD men's shoes.
student of "Eeynolds's Mysteries of London."
'Life is full of family secrets and such like.'
'Lor, sir,' says Jane Dimond, when she has
recovered the shock of surprise ; ' I thought you
was dead and gone/
'Did you, Jane. Why?'
' Because I fancied if you was in the land of the
livin* you wouldn't have turned a deaf ear to that
advertisement.'
' What advertisement ? '
' The advertisement as Miss Faunthorpe — I heg
pardon, Mrs. '
' Never mind the name, girl. Tell me all about
the advertisement.*
Jane explains herself in a roundabout way, but
in due course Alexis knows all that Jane knows,
except his wife's present abode. That the girl
refuses to tell even to him.
'She told me to keep it a secret, and I'm not
going to tell no one without her permission,' says
Jane resolutely.
This resolve the husband combats, but in vain.
' I'll arst her leaf to tell you, and when I've got
AT arm's length. 293
her leaf I'll tell you/ answers Jane. ' Wild horses
wouldn't move me from that'
'Telegraph to her then directly/ cries Alexis,
taking out a handful of silver. ' Come with me to
the nearest telegraph office, and I'll write the mes-
sage for you. You can put in the address yourself.'
' No, I won't send her no telegrafts, lest I should
get her into trouble with her friends. I'U write to
her/
* Inexorable girl ! Is she in the country ? '
'Yes/
' And the country post is gone ever so long. I
shall have to wait twenty-four hours before you can
get her answer/
' I can't help that,' says Jane, with an inflexible
air. ' She's trusted 'me, and I'U do my dooty by her.
As you've stayed away so long it can't hurt you to
stay a little longer.'
* Stayed away so long, cruel girl ! Don't you
know that it was she who left me ? '
' Whatever she did, I make no doubt she did it
for the best,' answers Jane, true to the fair young
governess whose donations of lace and ribbon, soiled
294 DEAD men's shoes.
gloves, darned stockings, and friendly smiles, had
won her heart years ago.
'See here, Jane,' says Alexis, unfolding a five-
pound note. * Here's something to buy you a silk
gown for Sundays. Now don't you think that you
could contrive to tell me the address at once ? You
know my wife wishes to see me. The advertisement
says that.'
' No, it don't,' answers Jane, taking a tiny slip of
paper out of her shabby old portemonnaie. * The
advertisement says nothing of the kind.'
She reads as follows : —
' S. S. to Alexis. You are not forgotten. In all
I do I am faithful to your interests. I look forward
to our reunion. Wait and hope, as I do. Write
and tell me where you are, and what you are doing.
— Address, S. S., Post Office, Hale Street, Pimlico.'
'There, you see,' exclaims Jane, triumphant.
' There's not a word about wanting to see you. She
only wants to hear from you.'
* Heartless woman ! ' mutters Alexis. * Yet I'm
glad she was just a little anxious to know my fate.
I'll go to a coffee-house, and write to her, and bring
AT aem's length. 295
the letter to you to post. There's the silk gown
for you all the same, Jane, to show that I bear no
malice.
' Oh, sir ! ' cries the housemaid, overcome by this
generosity, * I couldn' think '
'You needn't think about it. You've only to
take the money and buy your gown. I'll go and
write my letter.'
He goes to the nearest coffee-house and wTites to
Sibyl. There is a touch of bitterness in the compo-
sition, though his wounded heart is full of love for
her all the time. Neither exile nor the sense of her
^nkindness have been strong enough to exclude her
from his heart. He may pretend to himself and to
his friend Dick Plowden that he has ceased to love
his wife, that he seeks his child alone ; but the mere
fact that she has souGjht to obtain tidings of him is
enough to melt his heart, to change pride and anger
to love and pardon.
' Whatever the exalted sphere in which you now
move,' he writes, 'you may be glad to know that
your desertion has not quite been the death of me.
I have contrived to live, somehow, though indigna-
296 DEAD men's shoes.
tion against your cruelty has lacerated my heart,
and love for the wife who deserted me has proved
an incurable disease. I have not starved or been
driven to hang myself, and I have come back from
the other side of the world because I have a foolish
hankering to know the fate of the woman who swore
at the altar to love, honour, and obey me, and kept
her vow by abandoning me in my darkest hour of
need. Where are you, Sibyl ? and with whom ?
What has been your reward for deserting me ? Has
your scheme of life been a wise one ? Have your
hopes prospered ?
* Write and answer all these questions freely and
fully if you recognise the tie which, in the sight of
God and man, makes us two one. Tell me about
our child, the infant I have never seen, yet whose
baby face has haunted my dreams. You have given
your babe to the care of strangers perhaps, but I
conclude you have watched over its welfare.
'Tell me further if there are in your life —
prosperous as it may be — some few weaker moments
when your heart yearns for reunion with the
husband you once loved. But no, love, I will show
AT arm's length. 297
you an easier way. Do not stop to answer one of
these questions.
* Write, Sibyl, from your heart to mine. Tell me
in three words to come to you, and I will come. I
will come, dear, and all [the past, all that you have
made me suffer, shall be forgotten and forgiven in
the rapture of our reunion. — Yours for ever, if you
will have it so, — Alexis.'
He is swayed to and fro by diverse passions as
he writes this letter, now all bitterness, now fond
unreasoning love. He has not the courage to read
over his effusion, but seals and addresses it hastily^
and hurries back to Lowther Street. There is no
difficulty about admittance this time. Jane
Dimond opens the door, receives the letter, and
promises to post it that evening.
It is too late for any of the provincial mails, but
it is something to be assured that there shall be no
needless delay.
' I shall call for the answer the day after to-
morrow, in the evening. You ought to have it by
that time,' says Alexis, and it seems to him that the
interval will be an unendurable space of time.
298 DEAD men's shoes.
He thinks about that advertisement as he goes
back to the Brompton Road. Sibyl must have cared
for him a little, despite her heartless abandonment
of him, or she would not have felt this anxiety to
be informed of his fate. She would not have
committed herself by an act likely to entangle her
fate with his. Once having released herself from
him she would have held herself altogether aloof —
she would have stretched no friendly hand across
the gulf if she had not loved him. Her heart was
still his, he tells himself, when she made that appeal
to him. Whatever her scheme of life — whatever
game she was playing — her heart was true to him.
Comforted by this assurance he is inclined to be
wondrously indulgent, to forgive much, should she
but prove herself worthy to be forgiven.
He tries to occupy himself with hard-headed
business during that weary interval in which he
waits for Sibyl's reply. He goes down to Messrs.
Keel and Skrew's office, and enters upon the discus-
sion of certain extensions and improvements in the
Australian branch of the business, improvements
which his experience of the colony has suggested to
AT arm's lexgth. 299
him. He is well received, and his views approved by-
Mr. Keel, the senior partner — a gentleman with large
ideas, a palatial villa on Clapham Common, vineries,
pineries, succession houses, and a stable which is
a perennial source of profit to the horse dealers
and the veterinary surgeon, and a well-spring
of heart-burning and annoyance to its proprietor.
Mr. Keel is a gentleman who talks of thousands as
meaner people talk of sixpences, and is rumoured to
have started in life thirty years ago as a stevedore,
and to have founded his fortunes^upon the ill-gotten
gains supposed to be inseparable from that function.
Mr. Keel is pleased with Mr. Secretan's sugges-
tions.
* You're about the only fellow I ever sent out
who seems to understand the Australian trade,' he
says approvingly, ^ and .1 shall push you, young man,
mark my words, I shall push you.'
Cheered by this assurance, Alexis thinks what a
nice thing it will be for him to go back to Sidney
with his wife and child for his companions, if Sibyl
will but show herself true metal after all, and if his
child lives. Two formidable ' ifs.'
300 DEAD men's shoes.
He builds a delightful castle in the air, and looks
so well, fed upon this nutriment of hope, that
Samuel Plowden scrutinizes him with a serio-comic
expression when he returns to the outer office after
his interview with Mr. Keel.
' Why, I thought you came home on sick leave,
youngster/ says the kindly clerk. ' By Jupiter, I
never saw any one looking better.'
*A11 the effect of the voyage, Mr. Plowden, I
assure you. I was a shadow when I went on board
at Sidney.'
The second day after Mr.Secretan's interview with
Jane Dimond has come, and in the evening Alexis
knocks at the familiar door in Lowther Street, with
a heart that seems to beat louder than the knocker.
Jane Dimond appears promptly, and divining
his impatience, gives him the expected letter
without a word. He wrings her hand in speechless
gratitude, as if the letter were a boon from her ;
bids her a brief good night, and goes away with his
prize. He would rather read the letter in the
street, unwatched, than open it in Mrs. Hazleton's
hall, under the housemaid's friendly eyes.
AT arm's length. 301
Yes, it is from Sibyl, in the hand he knows so
well. The last letter he received from her was that
cruel renunciation, that most heartless farewell —
the loosening, nay, the severing of every link
between them. She writes to him again. There is
communion between them once more. The thought
thrills him.
She begins well at aU events : —
' DeAEEST — DEAEEST — DEAEEST ! '
There is love's fooHsh rapture in a gush of pen
and ink.
' Thank God for your dear letter, though it is not
altogether kind. Still it promises forgiveness for
my wrong-doing, and that is much. Thank God for
the knowledge that you are living and weU. My
heart grew very heavy when that advertisement of
mine remained unanswered.
' You ask me if my scheme of life has realized
what I coimted upon, if my hopes have prospered.
I can say yes to both those questions. I am on the
road to high fortime, fortune which you and I wiU
share in happy days to come if you are as true
to me as I am to you, though seeming estranged.
302 DEAD men's shoes.
In a very little while, dear, my most anxious hopes
will be realized. The realization is so near that
it would be worse than folly to sacrifice those hopes
now, as I must sacrifice them if I were to obey you,
and say come to me.
' I long to see you, my heart aches, my soul
sickens at the thought that we must wait for the
hour of reunion. But I am not so weak a slave
to impulse as to abandon my prize, just as it is
almost won. We must wait, dearest. I ask from
you patience and trust. I give you my daily
prayers, my nightly dreams. There is no wrong-
doing in my scheme of life. I injure no one, least
of all do I wrong you. I only forego the happiness
of sharing your life for a little while in order to
make it brighter afterwards.
' Write to me, dear husband, from time to time,
and let me write to you, but let our correspondence
pass through the hands of that good girl, Jane
Dimond. I know your impulsive nature, and I
cannot trust you with my address, for fear you
should come here and destroy all my plans. I am
known in my present circle only as Miss Faun-
AT arm's length. 303
thorpe. All my hopes would be shipwrecked if
I stood confessed as Mrs. Secretan. Yet, believe
me, there is no shadow of wrong to you in this
concealment. It is for our mutual welfare. You
ask me about our child, Alexis. Our child, our
son, is safe and well. I dare tell you no more
than that.
' Ever, through all changes and dangers, your
true and loving wife, ' Sibyl.'
' Is she mad ? ' Alexis asks himself, indignantly,
after reading this letter. 'Does she think I am
to be put off with loving words and assurances of
constancy ? Does she suppose that she can keep
me at a distance by concealing her address and
writing to me under cover to a housemaid?
Wherever she may have hidden herself, my business
shall be to find her, and my first visit shall be
to Eedcastle. I'll go straight to her uncle, the
doctor, and unearth this mystery.'
END OF VOL. I.
tONDON:
J. AND W, RIDBE, PBIITTEBS,
BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE.
m
-— - Mi
IGHTOWV,'
ON AND /, ;